


The Memory Of Heat

by Pink_Siamese, Spiced_Wine



Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Crossover Pairings, F/M, Original Characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-28
Updated: 2011-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-20 19:39:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 51,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pink_Siamese/pseuds/Pink_Siamese, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spiced_Wine/pseuds/Spiced_Wine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when Vanimórë (of Spiced Wine's Dark Prince AU) finds himself in Lugmoki's (of Pink Siamese's Dawn of Many Colors AU) version of Middle-earth? What happens when the presence of a former balrog (Coldagnir of Spiced Wine's DP AU) awakens the balrog of Moria? We're writing this to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Door (I)

She observed the progression of the Queen of Mordor, how the fierce-looking guards formed their proper ranks and passed through the stilted and formal body-language of assisting the Mouth of Sauron in the exit from her bedecked carriage, not a wrinkle in her cloak or so much as a bit of dust on the fitted lace veil that covered her eyes, nor a smudge in the red paint upon her lips or the pattern of dots on her chin that paid homage to her origins on the Gorgoroth. The positioning of the guards swallowed her in a tight phalanx of spears and scimitars, the turban on her head obscured by a crowd of similar black turbans, shielding her from the casual eye, all as they were supposed to do, and they did it like a well-oiled machine as they escorted the woman called Móriel, and Saurë, and Lady of the Tower, and Black Bride, to the crumbling stone building.

Lugmokí watched from beside her exhausted and dust-caked horse, dressed and armed as a maulob, one of the elite female warriors of Barad-Dûr, as her double entered the caravansary. People staying at the inn made a crowd around the guards, wishing for a glimpse of the Mouth, and a few of them tossed handfuls of flower petals onto the threshold. Someone had hung the Mordorin flag from the balcony in greeting and the ornate form of the Eye faded and flickered within a convergence of moonlight and torchlight.

A boy came forward and offered to take the horse. Lugmokí smiled at him and nodded and gave him three tiny gold coins.

The courtyard smelled of water and sun-soaked dust and lemon blossoms and the spicy petals of Soldier’s Bloom. The maulobí and other soldiers unpacked and Lugmokí went to the fountain, where she filled her skin and drank, then sat on a stone bench to wash the dust off her feet. The stone still held the heat of the day and it soothed the muscles in her thighs. A young girl with missing teeth came forward and offered to wash her feet but Lugmokí waved the girl away. The water was cool, smelling of minerals lost deep in the earth, and it carried the dust with it back into the ground.

One of the maulobí sat beside her. She unwound her own sandals, rinsed the grit away, and massaged the ball of her foot. “What will you do?”

“Perhaps eat more,” said Lugmokí. “Then go to the baths. And you?”

“Go to Onau and see that she is ready to make the switch back to maulob of Mordor.”

Lugmokí grinned. “Be certain that she has wine and figs and a massage before she goes to bed.”

“I will.”

Lugmokí watched the people of her own caravan mingle with the people of others, and the stalls filled with merchants selling fruit and cooked meats, the places where tack and sandals and clothes were both repaired and made, and took a deep breath before looking up at the slice of sky framed by the stone walls. It was still purple, but it would be black soon, and full of the open desert’s bright stars. Lugmokí went to a fruit seller’s stall and purchased a heavy pomegranate and split it open, holding it overhead to catch the ruby juice in her mouth. She spilled some of it and wiped her chin with her sleeve, licking the sticky juice off her lips and waving at the flies that swarmed up out of the growing things in the courtyard and sought a taste. She wandered around the market, picking the seeds out with her fingers and crunching them, eating slowly as she looked at cages of birds brought up out of the jungles and traded for their flashing colors, the corals and shells of pale warm seas, the rolls of sturdy cotton stacked alongside the woven-air of sheer silks and gold-embroidered purple linens, the leathers made of snakeskin, the fragrant baskets of cinnamon and star-spice.

Lugmokí discarded her empty rind, rinsed off her hands, and made her way out of the courtyard, moving through cool and smoky corridors toward the baths. The sense of momentum had departed her flesh and now she felt the dust in her hair and the grit on her skin, the salt left behind and clinging as her long day of sweat evaporated into the bright and ruthless air, in addition to every hour spent on horseback and each step pounded into the bones of her tired feet. She smelled the humidity of the pools long before she saw them and smelled the dankness of mold growing in the cracks of the stone. An attendant met her at the doors and for a coin let her into a changing area lit with floor-lanterns soldered out of multicolored glass and filled with citrus-scented oils to keep the omnipresent mosquitoes at bay. Lugmokí stripped off her turban, her armor, her belt of arms, her spiked gauntlets, her purple tunic and her sandals, piling them all into a locked basket, and then she took down her thick braid and unraveled it, her dark curls lank and matted with sweat. She unraveled them with her fingers, patient with the knots, shaking out her hair until it covered her back to the waist. A girl stowed away her things and gave her a large unbleached cotton towel.

She walked out into the bath, which was square and sunken and tiled with poor pink marble, surrounded by a plain pillared room, and she stepped down into the sun-warmed water. She dunked under to soak her hair, and sitting on a bench with the water up to her ribs she began the long process of lathering it from roots to tips. Another woman shared the pool with her, a big black from the far south; her skin tone was far darker than the blacks of Mordor, polished ebony by the sun, and she wore her black hair twined into hundreds of narrow gold-beaded braids. She was broad through the shoulders and her hard muscles stood out, and as she washed her face the graceful dance of her musculature slipped beneath her water-beaded skin. She nodded to Lugmokí and smiled, her teeth startling white in the dim lamplight.

“Goodeven.”

Lugmokí inclined her head. “It is good.”

The woman scooped some shampoo out of a bowl and started to work on her own hair. “Did you come in with the Mordorin caravan?”

“That I did. And you?”

“Passing through on my way to the Spice Road.”

Lugmokí slipped beneath the surface. She swirled the lather out of her hair, rising up into the perfumed atmosphere face-first, slicking her hair back. As she rose up out of the water a sense of velvet shadow moved inside her skin, and out of this strange shadow came the suppressed scent of an iron dungeon and lightless stones glutted with ancient blood underscored by the slow burn of balrog-skin. Her eyes flew open and she saw only the baths, the damp walls fashioned out of thirsty sandstone and the dull pink marble pillars, and the black woman humming beneath her breath as she rubbed cinnamon-scented soap suds into her hair. She sat in the water and listened to its stone-bound restlessness, the echo of it off the ceiling, and reached deep into the darkness of her mind. _There are no balrogs here, and no dungeons, so who is carrying these memories? These very old memories._ She had never felt the stamp of the First Age upon anyone but Sauron, and Sauron was in Mordor, and had he not been in Mordor he would not have felt like this. Here there was anger so old that it was woven into the songs of cells and fibers and veins, and brokenness, and a great measure of wrought-iron compassion, and there was a restless passion scented with the petals of strange flowers. Sauron did not feel like this.

Except…he did. A little.

Lugmokí climbed out of the water.

* * *  


Maresh lay behind them. They had provisioned there for their journey into the Harad, been entertained by the lord of the city and now before them lay the desert, pitiless and beautiful, tinted crimson and bloody-rose in the sunset. Vanimórë had made this journey many times, though this was the first time for the warriors who accompanied him; hand-picked men from the steppes of Rhun, Variags and tribesmen of the northern desert, welded into one unit under his command. Sauron sent many emissaries into the south and east, but if something required his especial attention, he sent Vanimórë. On this occasion, a younger son of the Emir of Sudu Cull had enterprisingly disposed of his aging father and three older brothers and having attained the throne of that wealthy city, was making noises indicative of his displeasure at paying tribute to Mordor. Vanimórë was going to persuade him that such an attitude was unlikely to be concomitant with a long rulership. Questions such as 'What had Mordor done for us? were answered by 'Rather ask what Mordor can – and will – do to you.'

War was coming. Not yet. For now it was a distant murmur, a storm on the horizon, a storm that had been building since the time of Númenor. When it came, these desert trade routes would be filled with warriors marching under the banners of kings and chieftains heading north to challenge the waning power of once-mighty Gondor. But as Vanimórë rode into the setting sun, the heaviest traffic on this stony road were the merchant caravans. Haughty camels bellowed and swayed, pack mules plodded, and oxen pulled wagons heavy with amphorae of wine or oil, or sacks that leaked the sweet fumes of spices. At night, camp-fires sprang up and the noise of cymbals and flutes rose and the camps would break before dawn to cover as many leagues as the could before the sun scoured the blue sky.

They stared, the merchants, the occasional palanquin carrying nobles, the tribesmen driving their goats, as the banner of the Red Eye snapped past them, the riders swathed for desert travel but obviously and intimidatingly military. They brought Mordor with them, the overlord who sat in ageless power in the north, for he was Mordor. They never forgot him, but for most, he was a figure of legend, until he reached forth his hand and touched them from afar. Kings and Sultans rose and fell, generations lived and died, but Sauron remained.

One never bypassed caravansaries in a desert land, no matter how well equipped or how fit the beasts that bore one. And the warriors were glad to enter its shelter, to bathe and eat hot food, to take advantage of the entertainment offered.

Even in the bustle of the great court, people melted from Vanimórë's path. His men were still at that stage where they took pleasure in such respect and fear. Vanimórë garnered respect and had always evoked fear; anything else: liking, affection, friendship he had to work for. Save once.

No-one hailed them. No one asked them questions. Mordor was not required to answer them. The horses were taken to the farriers whose stalls belched the smoke of iron-burned hooves as they trimmed the horn and clapped on new shoes or re-set old ones, and the men waited to be dismissed. Vanimórë unbuckled a pack and gave them bags of coin, then went to perform his own ablutions. Some caravansaries, such as this one, boasted public baths, usually filled with talk as men gratefully cleaned sand and sweat from their bodies.

The noise ceased as soon as Vanimórë walked in. Word had gone ahead. Eyes watched him with expression ranging from curiosity to fear as he undressed, handing his clothes and sword harness to a waiting slave, then stepped into the water. The chamber became his, molding itself around his presence. Whatever his status, whatever his most private, hidden emotions, he was what he was.

The tattoos showed glossy, ink-black against white skin, then, as he bent forward, and a slave doused his hair, the brand of the Red Eye showed clear at the base of his spine. Some of the bathers left then, and others turned away. Few knew what that brand truly denoted, but it seemed to stare at them, and even had it not been there, the man himself was enough to worry them, with that milky flesh and unnatural purple eyes.

Vanimórë heard the whispers in their mind as he dried and dressed. Demon. White fiend. They were partly right, of course. Only the city rulers, or the court of Sauron knew whom he was, and to the majority of those he was the Slave of Sauron. It had become a title he had stripped of shame to all but himself.

The slave poured clean water through his hair, once, then again, and backed away as he climbed from the bath and put out a hand for a drying cloth. He dried himself, then took a bone comb from his pack, combed his hair and braided it methodically, a thick, wet rope that fell to his knees. The slave proffered a box of perfumed oils and he poured sandalwood into his palms, massaged it into his chest, under his arms. His clothes, durable leather, were taken to be aired and oiled against the cracking heat of the desert, and Vanimórë dressed, again in unrelieved black, buckled on his harness and thigh-sheath and walked out. Behind him, the talk slowly flowed back, more muted than before.

Torches were lit now in the central court, and the air was filled with the smell of roasting meat from the booths and stalls. The portal was never closed and travelers were still entering. The richer merchants, to whom these places were vital, left offerings for the upkeep of the caravansaries, and some, in the deep desert, were small, thriving towns. There was a great hall where the travelers bedded down and private rooms above ground level for the nobles who might pass through and did not want to sleep with the commonalty of the roads. Vanimórë often made use of such a room, simply to be alone, although his men would not want one tonight. Lights gleamed softly along the length of inner wall where the women entertained. It was a lonely life. Some were dancers who stayed only a few nights and paid for the use of the small chambers. Others seemed to become stranded, and some were slaves bought by the owner for this very purpose. Many slaves passed along the trade roads.

He did not trouble to don his traveling robes again. He was too accustomed to the stares of men to be discomfited, and no-one would approach him. He bought lamb wrapped in vine-leaves, spicy and delicious and washed it down with palm wine, tapped only hours ago. The horses were penned now, and munching at dry forage. He walked to the gate and made his way out.

The night was cold and glorious, the stars so bright that the scattered palms cast knife-sharp shadows and a half-moon was rising. Beggars crowded beyond the portal, but most slept now, rolled in rags. One woman was still awake, rocking back and forth as if demented, holding out cupped palms as he passed. He paused. Her eyes were closed above her veil, as if she were shutting out the world, but a stream of pleas rolled unceasingly from her covered lips.

He halted and folded his arms, tapping one booted foot on the earth. After a moment, one of her eyes opened, peeking up at him with the unmistakable hint of mischief, like a child hiding from an indulgent parent. He put out his hand and pulled her to her feet.

 _Sometimes, lady_ , he said into her mind. _I think thou doth simply enjoy surprising me._

She smiled and walked alongside him. Her step was supple as a girl's.

“It seems I cannot, any-more.”

“It is thy love of drama,” he replied. “Anyhow, thy mind gives thee away.”

Dana laughed. “Dear boy. I was waiting for thee.”

“Yes? Why? Thou canst go anywhere.”

“True,” she conceded. “But what I have to show thee is here.”

“Here, is desert.”

“Yes,” she agreed, with that smile.

They walked on. North of the road, the land was broken into dry gullies and towers of crumbling white rock. A bone-bare place. No-one came here, no one would want to save flies and scorpions. But Dana was inscrutable and silent for a long time.

“War comes,” she said at length.

“Yes.”

“And that thy fear; that Sauron will triumph and rule Middle-earth.”

“In war, lady, anything can happen.” Vanimórë spoke levelly. “But it seems inevitable. The West is failing. It is not that they are not valiant people, but in the end, it comes down to numbers. Hells, Sauron does not even need the orcs. He has enough Men.”

“And what wilt thou do, when he triumphs?” Dana asked, as if it did not much matter to her. It did of course. Vanimórë did not truly know the extent of her powers, but they were not the kind that could ever be destroyed whomever or whatever ruled Arda. Melkor had tried – and failed.

“The same as I have always done, lady.” He felt his mouth tighten, quoted the words Sauron had spoken to him long ago: “For me, there is no freedom. But there is one whom I will warn to leave Middle-earth.”

“I know.”

The narrow ravine bent around a buttress of rock. Vanimórë stopped. He could smell water, and flowers. He thought it was Dana, but walking beside her, she had smelled of myrrh and blue-gum smoke, as if she had recently been further south. No doubt she had.  
This was something else. A water hole? he wondered and saw her smile deepen. He took a few steps forward, out of the moon-flung shadow.

At first he thought he was looking at a piece of ancient masonry, some forgotten ruin barring the way. There was nothing else; no hidden spring, no flowers. But the scent breathed forth through the arch.

He felt her hand come down on his forearm.

“What is it?” he whispered, although there was no-one to hear them.

“Thou hast never seen this before,” she stated.

“A doorway from nowhere, leading to nowhere? No.”

Her laughter was amused. “Surely all doors lead somewhere, Vanimórë. What dost thou sense?”

“Power,” he said instantly, and then corrected that impression. “Energy. What is it?”

“Dost thou not want to find out?”

He fell silent, staring an the unanswerable question. Energy; yes, but alien, intangible. He breathed in and smelled rose-beds in hot gardens, the hawthorn odor of Elgalad’s hair, never forgotten, he smelled the air before a storm, and other scents that his memory chased and could not recognize. He felt silk and rain on hot skin and sex, tasted wine and fruit bleeding sweet juice and coppery blood. If the door had been a person, he or she would be that storm of tempting, visceral beauty. He felt the stone under his fingers, not knowing he had walked toward it, and part of his consciousness registered the grain, the realness, even as the solidity seemed to melt from him, the door frame itself widening until it was nothing, or as wide as the world itself.

“But what...?” He saw stars framed against the black arch. “What is it?”

Dana was gone.

“Lady,” he hissed and walked back. The scent was still around him, maddening and lovely. His mind exploded with questions which lead only to more. And the door simply stood there, telling him nothing.

 _What is it?_

Nothing. Not even the sense of Dana's teasing in his mind. Why would she show him this and then vanish – unless she wanted him to find the answers himself?

He made a point of never asking his father anything, although Sauron had certainly told him much, and taught him a great deal both purposefully and inadvertently. He had never spoken of anything comparable to this, however, nothing that even touched on it. And if Dana would not answer him, who else would? Goaded and reluctant his mind shaped a question along the unbreakable mental link that blood and power threaded between himself and Sauron. There was no reply.

He touched the stone of the arch again, tracing patterns that seemed to have worn with Ages of weathering. He stood back and let the sensation blow itself into him, sweet and powerful, unfamiliar and known. He pressed his hands against his head, felt his self-control strain at its leash, demanding answers.

Dana, he thought, pulling himself away with a conscious effort. Perhaps she had gone back to the caravansary. If she had brought him here for any purpose, she would surely explain it after he had exhausted his own mind in theorizing.

All he knew was that he had never seen this before, never felt this kind of energy. It was power of a sort, but not the kind of power he had known in Morgoth or Sauron, or in Dana, and that in itself troubled him. Yet what could he do? He could not move the door; he felt very strongly that it would be physically impossible, but his fingers remembered the shape and the patterns. He could sketch them, and perhaps he could return tomorrow, if Dana had not already answered his questions. And Hells, some-one was going to. This was like spinning around the edge of insanity, and he was too familiar with that battle. he took a deep breath, asked the question Maglor had asked him in Barad-Dûr.

 _What art thou?_

He watched for Dana as he strode down out of the harsh land, onto the flatness of the road. The caravansary still lit faintly from within, like a great square fire-bowl. His mind quested for her, but she, elusive when she wished it, or perhaps for other reasons, did not respond.

He paused within the portal, frowning. Another party had come in his absence. His mind absorbed the impressions of activity and placed the words Official. Armed escort upon them, based on the flicker of images. Two tall warriors were moving toward an archway. One of them glanced around and he found himself looking at an exotic, strange profile: dark brows winging up over bold, ridged bones. There was something almost feline in it. In her. It was a woman. They both were. Tall and wide shouldered as archers, but the curves, the grace of the bare feet and ankles were female.

His mind, already deluged by impossibilities struggled against this new thing. Women warriors? _In the Harad_? Yet they were not Haradhan. They were not Cathaian either; where he knew women could become Jujani Tong. And even there, women did not openly join the Imperial Army.

Then, like a double-punch he became aware of a scent. The doorway had exhaled it, among the others, and he must have been half-conscious of it since entering the portal of the building. It had the freshness of flowers, but the spice of incense.

The women disappeared. Somewhere, in a different part of the court, he heard the sound of a flute, clapping, the jingle of women dancing. The sound had quality he found odd. There was a joy in it, an eagerness, as if the women were dancing for pleasure, not for coin, or for the dubious pleasure of catching a mans eye that night. He raised his eyes toward a shimmer of color above the main hall. A flag was hanging there. The waver of torchlight gave it an added dimension of life. The Eye of Mordor...yet not. This was three Eyes, the corners meeting, as if each eye were the petal of a flower. _Three Eyes?_ No king in the Harad, no Khagan of Rhun or Palisor, not even the Emperor of Cathaia would dare to appropriate the emblem of the Eye.

One hand had dropped to the hilt of the knife at his thigh. His fingers closed around it. The brand above the cleft of his buttocks stung suddenly. He found himself walking toward the hall, the banner. Faces turned toward him, blurred in the torchlight. He put out an arm, intercepting a man swerving to avoid him.

“Who bears that banner?” he asked, and was surprised at the calmness of his own voice. Then, as the man did not answer, he turned his head, stared down into the dark eyes.

“The Lady...The Queen of Mordor.”

“ _What_?” The word struck the man like a whip. He jerked back.

“The Lady of the Tower. She who is the Mouth of Sauron.”

Vanimórë felt the seep of sweat under the sleeve, heard the gasp of pain as his fingers tightened on bone. He let go and the man ducked away from him, rubbing his arm, his mouth gone slack.

His mind closed itself defensively like the steel fist, an old, old reflex against the intrusion of Morgoth and Sauron; an act of defiance more than protection, for he could not repel either of them. But he needed the illusion of control at this moment, for he felt as if he had looked out of his tower room in Barad-Dûr and seen Gorgoroth covered by the Great Sea.

 _If one cannot escape the unbearable, one must confront it_ , he thought, as his inner self took a breath, shouldering the weight of something that could not be real. _Think ! Just because I do not understand something does not mean it cannot be understood. Here is sold ground under my feet, there is water flowing, I know the stars above me. This is not insanity_.

Dana's words echoed in his mind. _Surely all doors lead somewhere?_

The door? He found himself thinking of Valinor, removed from the circles of the world after the destruction of Númenor and yet somehow, still reachable.

 _But what has that to do with this?_

A touch on his mind drew his eyes down from the banner. A tall figure was walking from the archway where the female soldiers had entered. This too was a woman and walking freely and unveiled in a place where women did not show their faces in public. She paused between two lemon trees, which had not been there before, and torchlight illuminated her. The trees caused him to re-estimate her height upward. She was very tall, but carried herself with unconscious grace, as if it did not embarrass her. Some women, men too, stooped as if ashamed of being over-tall. This one did not. She bore herself as Dana did when the Mother was herself, and she was fair skinned, the symmetry of her features giving beauty a perfect balance, and he thought of Maglor, of his time as a willing prisoner of the Noldor. He sought behind her face on reflex and felt, like a fingerprint on her being, a fierce, intelligent will. He thought, in fact, that he felt Sauron, and instantly drew back, startled, from her spacious eyes. Resisting the impulse to draw his swords – what was there for him to fight? – he spun on one foot and strode down the length of the court, from torchlight to dark, until he reached the place where the horses had been penned for the night. because he had to see...

...that they were not there.

At least _his_ horses were not there.

At the last angle of the wall, a green vine grew, perhaps drawing its moisture from the animal's water troughs. He touched the leaves; they felt a little like holly, or ivy, smooth and resilient. Tiny flowers opened among them, cast that spice-bloom scent into his face. At last he turned, looked over the heads of the people, to the banner.

 _I will not go mad_ , he ordered himself, remembering the time after his sister's death, shut in a wormhole in the rock of Angband and becoming terrified of the dark and what might come out of it. He had commanded himself not to break under Morgoth, under Sauron, because he had known there would be nothing after that save the wreck of a thing that had once had a name, albeit a name given in mockery. So he had laid a vow upon himself then, and did so now. He would not fall into madness through fear, because fear was an enemy to be faced and overcome. And he was not mad. This was a real place.

 _I do not know these flowers_.

He had never seen their like anywhere on his travels.

 _Where am I?_


	2. Meeting

Lugmokí dried herself and changed into a plain black cotton dress, covering her damp hair with a lacy black veil.

The courtyard was closed for the night, and within its enclosure the fire jugglers and snake charmers set up their carpets, and the tumblers turned handsprings while musicians plucked the sort of rapid-fire melodies that vibrate their into the blood and stoke it into a fire. There would be some woman out there with a belt of shells, standing on a bench and quivering her hips, and soon she would be joined by her clapping sisters, and they would make a ring around her and close out the rapid falling chill of the desert night. They would forge a body-heated space.

Lugmokí felt the stomping feet and sharp counterpoint of clapping as she tied on her belt of arms, removing the sword but keeping a pair of daggers, the overlapping notes and voices of the crowd beyond the walls rising in her mind and overlaying the muted bones of sound that made their way through the stones. She foisted her pack and armor and dirty day’s clothes onto one of maulobí and slipped out of the baths, moving through the shadows of the archways among clouds of torch-diving moths, following the shape of velvet and shadow flickering inside her mind. It danced inside the sleeping places that knew the feeling of Sauron and dreamed of all the memories he would not share with her.

She stepped into the torchlight between a pair of lemon trees and the heavy scent of their blossoms drifted down over her shoulders like a shroud. Fireflies imported from the north and bred and kept by the inn-keepers fluttered in stuttering circles around the leaves, winking on and off. A man stood in the courtyard, tall and broad-shouldered and garbed in black, his thick black hair in a braid to his knees, intricate black tattoos sheathing the pale white skin of his arms. He watched her with sharp eyes the color of the gloaming, a strange dusky purple she had never before seen in the eyes of Men or Elves; he held himself with the hard-earned grace of a warrior, though it was a grace that bore the stamp of long years, an age of years unavailable to Men. The features of his face were strong and kept the symmetry of Elves and yet tempered them with a strange ferocity; he watched her with the keenness of a hawk, and she held still and looked back, trapped in her fascination even as she was unnerved by the sense of thunder that broke in his mind.

He drew back, she stepped forward, and in the instant his body pivoted Lugmokí’s hands went to the hilts of her daggers, the movement driven by a white-hot flash of adrenaline. With fluid motion he gave her his back, swift and striding through the crowd, heading for the paddocks. The adrenaline broke inside her blood and kindled a trembling rush of energy. She pulled in a deep breath. Her awareness drew down into a knife’s edge that sliced individual smells from the air: horseshit, sweating dancers marinating in their broken-down perfumes, sputtering torches, cooking food, the falling husks of burnt insects. She wanted to move her hands away from her hilts but she could not. She retreated into the hallway shadows. She used her mind to make herself dim and uninteresting to the people of the courtyard, her fingers resting light and curved around the hilts she had forged herself in a long-ago age; the memories in the metal stirred and whispered things to her heart that she had no wish to hear: you taste Aulendil in the fëa of this being who is not a Man and not an Elf, and there are things you do not know, and this is a strange secret. She drew close to the paddock, and in the dim reaches of the firelight she could see his outline, the frank fascination expressed in his body language with a stunted vine of Soldier’s Bloom. It grew from a place near the troughs where water hit the ground just often enough, and his interest puzzled her. She reached out with her mind, drawing close enough to feel the confusion rising off him like heat-shimmers in the dunes, just close enough to get the sense but not close enough to touch, sensing his tension in him and his hair-trigger.

Her feet froze to the stone.

* * *

Dana, Vanimórë called, beating down the fear of the unknown, and there was nothing -- nothing but the sense of her that the land itself carried. Then abruptly, to the one he would never call father: My Lord? He sensed something on the outermost rim of his awareness, some glimmering at the edge of the pool into which the stone of shock had plunged, but Sauron would have replied along the line of his thought with sharp immediacy. He waited and none came, but there was something more immediate, something intimate, and close: that feeling of Sauron’s imprint inside the woman whom had stood between the lemon-trees. The familiarity of it had caused him to draw away, for it was Sauron and not-Sauron; the mark of his touch smoldered there, and Vanimórë had recoiled.

The Lady of the Tower, she who is the Mouth of Sauron, the man had said. But I know the Mouth, he thought, and he closed his eyes. She wore simple clothes and moved without concern, as if she cared not who saw her, or as if no-one would recognize her just as few people would recognize him; Vanimórë knew the man meant the woman in the lemon-trees.

There was no simple explanation. This was not some upstart queen from a distant land challenging the Lord of Mordor, bringing her female warriors to flaunt them in the face of custom.

All doors lead somewhere.

He had passed through the door almost without thought, and had walked back to the same caravansary, on the same ancient road, into a Harad he did not know. It was impossible, and yet it was.

Vanimórë stood still. He felt the woman’s mind draw inward, closing but almost courteous in its curiosity. It was a sensation he knew, although Morgoth had been a hammer and Sauron a blade and Dana melted through his defenses like an long-welcomed embrace; this woman was curious and wary, but as a warrior is wary, waiting for a move or an opening. She is wondering what I am, he realized, just as he was wondering who she was. Sauron breathed in her flesh and mind like blood, repelling him even as he was repelled by himself.

She had followed him. He opened his eyes and she came, silent and shrouded, pushing the tight shell of her aura ahead of her like the prow of a ship slicing into the night. She is only halfhearted in her attempts to hide either her mind or her body. He watched the tall dark-clad figure drawn under the open colonnade of arches, admiring the skill exercised upon other eyes and minds, her designs to pass unnoticed and encourage the blind eyes of absent-minded people. He walked away from the peaceful, penned animals, keeping his steps slow. Coming level with her, he stopped and turned, seeing the gleam of her knuckles upon the hilts of two weapons. She held them as he held his, not with the tightness of inexperience or with the laxness of ennui, but as a warrior holds his or her weapons, easy and familiar in the hand. Their eyes locked in the shadow-play of the night.

“Whom art thou, lady?” He pitched his voice deliberately low.

She stood still and there was only her respiration to show that she was not a statue. She held the moment, then let it fly on her breath. “What are you?”

She spoke in the Black Speech, giving it a lilt and inflexion that was formal, even beautiful. His face remained impassive. “They call me the Slave of Sauron. And what art thou? He is part of thee. Or thou of him.” He laughed like a curse. “Wilt thou give me a name? I am Vanimórë. So he called me. Perhaps he thought it was amusing. He got me, lady. I am his son.”

She blinked, and in that blink the rigidity of her body seemed to soften. One of her hands tightened around a hilt and with a slow scrape she withdrew one of her blades. “Why do you laugh? I am the one they call the Lady of the Tower. I am the Mouth of Sauron.” The words he has no son drifted onto the back of her tongue but she kept her lips closed. She lifted her chin. The blade rested along the outside of her thigh. “Where do you come from?”

“I know the Mouth of Sauron, lady. I know where he came from.” His eyes dropped to the blade. “No, I do not think thou art lying.” He tilted his head toward where the banner hung across the entrance to the hall. “That is the Eye of Sauron, yes? But no. Not to me. Mordor uses the emblem of the Red Eye. One single eye. And in the Mordor I know, and know very well, there are no women warriors.” He gauged her stance. “I was riding to Sudu Kull with fifteen men on Sauron’s orders.” His words came harder, crisper. “My horses were penned there, and they are gone, and I wager my men too. I walked out into the desert as night fell. Some-one…guided me. There was a door there, in that no-land of rock and heat. I walked through it. This is the Harad, lady, Mouth of Sauron. But I do not know it.”

She felt his eyes follow the keen edge of her blade. “Yes, it is the Eye, the Triune Eye, it was wrought a thousand years past.” At mention of the door her body became very still. Her other hand tightened on its hilt but she didn’t draw. “This is madness.” Her neck lifted and her eyes glinted in the ephemeral shadows. “Madness in the desert.”

“The door,” he said. “It is known to thee.”

She wore obdurate silence like a mask and he resisted the temptation to delve deeper underneath the carved beauty of her face.

“Madness? So it feels to me,” he said. “That banner. Thou, with him in every part of thee, yet I feel no darkness in thee, and that, lady, troubles me. I am Sauron’s son, and no ancient enemy of his from lost Númenor, no fallen Elven-king could hate him as much as I. Yet thou art his as surely as I am.” He slowly raised his hands and turned. Shadows passed over his skin and leathers. “The emblem of Mordor is branded on my skin. Below my waist. If thou wouldst see it.”

Lugmokí watched the breadth of his back and his lifted hands, his tattoos rendered strange between the uncertain light and his musculature. She sheathed her blade, stepping closer, every inch of her skin alert to his presence, and as she drew close enough to put her hands on his belt she smelled him, the heat of his body wafting through the leathers in a mingling of sandalwood and sweat. She reached around and loosened his belt, conscious of the slow measure of his breath, and then she loosened his leather pants just enough to inch down the waistband. She saw lines, visible in the dark only because of his paleness; she could not make out their shape or texture, nor their color, so she touched them. The burnt skin felt warmer than the rest and it hummed with a strange broken magic, darkling within her mind, and inside that she sensed a viciousness and a deep cold, the romancing of madness, and still below all of that a great loneliness resonant with heat and hatred.

He held himself still as she loosed his belt and felt her hands, deft at dealing with buckles and harness, pause as she drew down his breeches. Her body and hair exhaled a faint scent of soap, jasmine and nutmeg and the blue lotus that grew in the great river of Mordor’s slow waters, and it made him think of power and cruelty masked as beauty: Sauron as Annatar, soft and beautiful, brilliant and seductive. The cadence of her breath halted as she touched the brand with cool fingers. It was old, but unfading. The memory of Sauron’s words came into his mind, scented of ash and anguish, stinging the mark on his flesh: It is thine own choice, my son. All this is thine own choice. It can stop whenever thou doth wish. He felt anew the rage of his helplessness. She snatched her fingers away and stepped back and wrapped her arms around herself. He slowly buckled his belt and turned.

“What didst thou feel?” he whispered. “His touch? And now, I ask thee, lady. What art thou?”

“I am called Lugmokí, and while I have other names it is the name that is closest to me.” She paused, and in that short span of time her arms tightened. “There are other worlds. I don’t…I-I don’t know this.” She nodded at his waist. “This is not the Sauron of my life. It is…but as he might have been.”

“Lugmokí.” He repeated the name under his breath. He listened, frowning and catching her words, trying to comprehend them. “Other worlds? Sauron as he might have been?” He thought of his words to Dana: For me there is no freedom. She had led him to that door as a man would lead a horse to water. “This is Arda, but a different…version of it? Like a book, copied by scribes and words are altered and change their meaning?”

“No. It is not so much like a book.”

Vanimórë was beyond disbelief. This was not a dream, not a vision. Dana had led him to that portal to show him…what? That there was freedom, of a kind? “Sauron is Sauron.” His hands went out and caught her arms. “But thou art not afraid of him. Morgoth’s Lieutenant, he whose machinations led to the fall of Númenor, who killed Gil-galad.” He did not try to hide his skepticism. “And I was there, I saw it, who seeks to be overlord of the world? Is this not thy Sauron?”

Her muscles tautened beneath his palms. “I don’t know how to explain it with words that are easy to understand. There are many ways to exist and not all of them are known to Elf-kind or even to those of the Maia race. I…” She stopped and let out a long breath. She looked at him from beneath her lashes. “The doors are the doors between worlds. Sauron believes that Melkor made them, but it isn’t known, by him or by me or by anyone, who did. The Valar would have us believe that there is only one world and that it is flat like a map or that it was until they bent the roads to Valinor. But it’s not true.” She lifted her chin. “I am not afraid of him. Why would I be afraid of him?”

“The Valar.” He felt disgust on his tongue. “I do not believe or trust the Valar. They condemned souls to the Void for breaking their laws.” He fell silent and watched her, trying to read the lie, to smell the fear in her, see her as a slave as he was a slave. “Sauron tells me very little, and nothing like this. Morgoth made doors between worlds?” He shook his head. “Then why did he not escape through one, rather than be cast out of Arda?” He gathered his thoughts. “Why wouldst thou not fear Sauron? I had…a sister once. She even looked a little like thee. She feared and rightly. Sauron would’ve given her to Morgoth as a toy. When he could not, he simply substituted her for me. And when Morgoth was gone…” He hammered down his words, his everlasting hate which was so much greater than hate. “I am his son. His toy. His slave. What art thou to him then?”

“I am his proxy, his diplomat, and the instrument of his rule, though it’s overstating such to call it rule. It’s more like that management of a very large house, if a house can be likened to a country.” Her tongue sharpened. “The Valar are not trustworthy, and there is little nobility there, despite the sweetened words uttered by much of Elf-kind. Númenor did not need our help to fall. Númenor accomplished such a dubious fate on its own regardless of any and all attempts at intervention and they are prideful fools who earned their ignobility. As for Melkor’s use of the doors…how do you know he has not?”

At least, he thought, their vision of the Valar was the same. “We truly are not speaking of the same Sauron, if he uses a woman as a diplomat, if he gives thee any power at all.” He stared at her and thought of Melkor and felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach. “No. Melkor is bound…” But how do we know? It was Glorfindel, met at the Last Alliance and reborn, who had told him that the Valar had banished Melkor, and though Glorfindel had had no love for the Valar he had believed. “I think,” he murmured, “I would like something to drink.” He loosened his grip on her arms. “And then…” He almost said return to the door, but return to what? Slavery, the coming war. “I need to think.”

She looked at his hands and then looked at his face. “I am free to come and go as I please, yet I choose to remain the Lady of the Tower. It is said by the Valar that Melkor was thrust by them into the Void, and it is true that I have never felt the presence of Melkor and neither has Sauron throughout all of these long years, but the Valar only tell to others that which keeps them in favor.” She studied the language of his body, the thoughts flitting through the tension of his muscles. “The door is no longer there. Even if it were it may not take thee where thy wishes to go.”

“The Sauron I know would not want Melkor to return.” He wondered if Sauron here, in this Arda, felt the same. He considered the Lady of the Tower, with no lie in her eyes, and wondered if Sauron was as capable of deception, of showing her only the fairest facets of himself. “How dost thou know that? That the doorway is gone? Has no-one ever gone through one and returned? Not even Sauron? And would he tell thee if he had?” He felt suddenly isolated and wondered at it; save one person who was beyond him, there was nothing in his Arda save servitude and hate, and yet that bitter flavor was what he knew. He fought to breathe. “Art thou his daughter then?”

“No, I am not his daughter. He made me, yes, but he did not get me on the body of any woman, and he did such with a craft that is nigh beyond my powers of explanation and likely far beyond your powers of comprehension.” She moved closer to him and lowered her voice. “The Sauron I know would want Melkor to return, and I would want it, for I would like to know that which I have been storied about.” Her voice drew close to a whisper. “Do you not feel the door’s absence? They are fickle things, coming and going as they please, open long enough to do their business and no more. Orcs of the Gorgoroth call them the Dreaming Doors.”

“Perhaps I might comprehend,” he said, “I think neither Sauron is a fool, and neither am I, but as I said, there are many things he does not tell me, and for all I know these…dreaming doors may be one of them.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Dreaming Doors? That sounds poetic for an orc. Wouldst thou tell me orcs here are civilized?” But there was too much rage in him to bar it for much longer without great struggle; she spoke, and without malicious intent, of enemies, of wounds that never healed, of shame, of pain, of degradation. “No.” His voice slipped out like a steel blade. “Morgoth wanted naught in the end but destruction. And he got it, through it took the lives of millions to prize the Valar from their cold thrones in the West. I thought I might be free when he was gone…” He longed to shake some sense into her, to make her see reality, but he did not, for this was her reality and not his. “I lived in Angband, and I tell thee, thou wouldst be wasted there.” He took a step back, bringing the whole of her into his vision: Sauron’s get in some way, even as he was, but not a slave, not something to use. He spoke both to her and himself: “What must I do now?”

“Come with me to my rooms,” she said. “You’ll have your drink.”


	3. Desire Will Bloom Where It Finds Soil

He followed, watching her move. She was at home here, in her rightful place, for this was her place, not his. Her world, not his. Torchlight moved across her then, as her steps carried her beyond it, dropped her into shadow, so that he had impressions of light and dark, as if she moved across a bank of windows.

 _Her_ Sauron.

Her Sauron used his creation, but not as his father used him. There was no hidden dread under the bones of her skin, nothing in the eyes but her assurance of station, natural as a long-worn garment. He thought of worlds. Of doors into worlds.

Dana had known of the Doors, and showed him a way to freedom.

And in this world, Sauron was a benevolent ruler. In this world, orcs were poetic, and women could wield power. Yet there were some similarities: Númenor had been destroyed, as it had been in his own world. Melkor was gone.

Or was he?

He did not want to think of Melkor free, slipping among worlds, however many there might be, as easily as a man walks through doorways into different rooms. Is that what these worlds were? The same house – Arda, but with many rooms, all slightly different. In this room he did not exist. Lugmokí did. But Sauron did, and the lands were the same, in both worlds, this caravansary welcomed travelers on the trade road. Somewhere, through that door, his horses were penned, his men waiting for their captain – who was, it seemed, not going to come back. The same half-moon shone down on both worlds. Incredible. Impossible. And true.

He heard the sound of pipes and the deeper music of lust, men’s and women’s both, eager and unforced. He watched Lugmokí walk before him with the stride of a warrior, the grace of a woman, confident to the bone under her own shuttling loom of thoughts.

Elgalad, he thought, with a sudden drop that left his heart hollow. Did he exist in this world? If he did, he had never known Vanimórë and that hurt him. He felt it like a death, as if some mocking god had taken away something sweet and precious, the little gem he had hidden, the only thing that had not been taken from him. He pounded the emotion down, brutal with himself because he had to be. It went beyond irony – this longing for familiarity, for his old life, for he would have to be truly insane to wish to go back to that. Yet it was what he knew, and he had molded a life for himself, even as life had molded him, so that he fitted into it. That sense of not fitting was what beat panic-wings about his mind.

 _Think_ , he told himself. _Be calm. These Dreaming Doors are apparently a mystery even in this world. Perhaps it is possible to return. Perhaps people from this have crossed into mine. Dana knew of them, lead me to one, perhaps she uses them. Whomever made them will know how to use them. Find him, or her, and I will discover how to go back._

He hoped to Eru the creator was not Melkor.

And he would use this time to learn about this world. Why was Sauron so different? He ruled in both because he could, and Vanimórë would admit that. The methods of the two Saurons were utterly unalike.

Lugmokí. How did Sauron make her? And for what? He had wrought well, but then, of course, he could. Were they lovers? Sauron  – he corrected himself  – the Sauron he knew had always seemed as sexually fluid as himself. Desire bloomed where it found soil, like that tough, sweet flower near the water troughs.

She turned back, framed by the arch of a door, gesturing inward, white skin against veiled black hair. He thought of the secret priestesses of Dana, leading men into their chambers of sweet smoke and mysteries sealed ever after by silence. He followed.

Where else could he go?

* * *  


While Lugmokí’s guard took up the entire tower floor, her personal rooms were small; they were the well-appointed rooms of a wealthy merchant and his wives, not the rooms of a queen.

There were three rooms, structured so that one ran into another, with doors carved like wooden screens between them. The first room was a sitting room, with a low table and brightly-colored cushions to sit upon, with a small curtained window whose shutters opened to a nighttime view of the desert. Oil lanterns assembled from carved metal and colored glass swung from rings in the ceiling. The whitewashed walls hung with smoke-scented tapestries and a bowl of lemon blossoms sat at the center of the table, offering their sweetness to the sand-scented shadows. The second room was smaller, and it held a trunk of her clothes and cosmetics and jewelry; in normal instances rolls of quilts would be spread on the floor for the children and servants to bed down for the night.

The third room was the bedroom, and it was the most spacious, with a pair of windows to look out on the dunes and a canopied bed big enough for a man and three wives. There was a small brazier for heat against chill nights and there were a pair of comfortable divans upon which to recline with a cup of wine and watch the stars of the evening unfold. Lugmokí brought him into her bedroom, to the pair of divans by the windows, and she lit a pair of red-glass lanterns and set them on the floor before disappearing back into the second room just long enough to remove her veil. Vanimórë cast a look about the room, subtly different from the one he might have lodged in. Perhaps richer, more exuberant -- that was the word that came to mind. The bowl of lemon blossoms: no servant would have placed it in his chambers, but then he led a military escort. Strange, the perception that warriors had no use for beauty. She emerged in bare feet, her hair tied back with a simple cord. It caught the lamplight like black glass.

“I’ve sent for wine,” she said.

“My thanks.” A half-smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “I do not think it will do much good, but…” He hesitated and then with a faint shrug he unbuckled his swords and set them down.

“You asked for a drink,” she said, returning his half-smile with a full one of her own. “And so it shall be done.”

“I doubt there is any drink, even the fabled white mead of Valinor, that will truly help. But for now…” He raised a hand. “I can do nothing. Can I? It is strange---if anything can add to the strangeness of this night, that I should be here, in my world, and thou also. Proxy of Sauron, ambassador, diplomat. Made by Sauron…as I was.”

One of the maulobí entered the room, carrying two earthenware cups. Lugmokí bowed as she took them, and the maulob bowed in return and swept out of the room without so much as a glance in Vanimórë’s direction. His eyes followed her. She was like the two he had seen earlier; that alien cast of bone and feature, strange and somehow exotic. Here was another place where their worlds diverged, for he had seen nothing like it before, and yet something in it was familiar. Lugmokí handed him one of the cups, and she removed her belt and daggers before taking her seat.

He bent his head and drank. The wine was very good. “I am not thirsty, lady,” he said. “I seek…” He laughed. “Forgetfulness. A balm. But I thank thee. I want---need---to discover more about these doorways, and I have time. But yes, this is a place to start. A place to put my feet. Here.”

Lugmokí glanced at the empty door. “She is kanturuk. A quarter of Orcish blood. I see the question in your face.” She took a sip of wine and set the goblet on the floor. “There is forgetfulness to be found in wine, it is true. But would you forget all that you were?”

“Orcish blood? Bloody Hells.” He came up against a self-erected wall in his mind. His eyebrows went up. “Orcs interbreed freely with men?”

“Yes, and they have done so for generations.”

“Would I forget? Most of it, yes. But then, I would be nothing.” He put down the wine-cup. “I cannot hear him,” he murmured. “I even called to him, a thing I never do, and yet I cannot feel him. There was never a time he was not in my mind.” He reached out, took her hand in his, and turned it over. “And in this world, he made thee. Flesh, blood.” He felt the hush of the pulse in her wrist. “Made a thing of beauty who does not hate him.” Anger gathered somewhere inside him, the helpless, horrified anger of a youth who had begged his father to help him. “I want to look at thee and hate thee. I want to see Sauron in thee, the Sauron I know. And, because I have never lied to myself, I have to say that I cannot. That is…difficult.” _I want one glimpse of darkness. One thing for my hate to latch onto, because it has to go somewhere._

Lugmokí rose from her divan, lifted the hem of her dress, and knelt between his knees. “I have no darkness to give you.” She looked up. “If I had it, I would give it.” She took hold of his other hand. “Such hatred should not be contained.”

“Thinks’t thou I like it?” His voice changed at her closeness, at the scent of her. “Is he thy lover then? A good one? A considerate lover? Of course he would want thee.” His anger became a solid thing, a hot coal within him, and altered even as it flared to life; he had always had to convert his anger, for to unleash it on the Powers was a futile and heartbreaking endeavor. He molded it into something else, forced it to become fuel. “Do not taunt me with those eyes, this body,” he said, closing the gap between them. “Thou art everything I am not, canst thou not see it?”

Lugmokí rose and moved herself astride his lap. “He is my lover. Dost that disturb thee?”

A backwash of rage flooded his mind. Sauron was her lover and she had not suffered by it. Here was no trained odalisque tempting him; he had known enough of them. She was only a woman, a woman the way he was a man, and she wore her desire upon her skin and in the cadence of her breath, cradled within the fall of her hair.

“It would be beneath me to taunt you.” She ran the backs of her fingers along his jaw. “And yes,” she whispered into the corner of his mouth. “I see it very well.”

 _Yes. She would. Of course._

His fury transmogrified into fire as she touched him, grounding like lightning straight into his groin. He felt her strong thighs under his fingers, smooth and muscled as warm marble, and his hands glided over them, toward the heat of her. “No,” he murmured. “Thou art not taunting me.”

She was like a magnet, even as Sauron could be, but she was not Sauron. She reached back and untied her hair and he did not want to think about what she was. Pleasure---true pleasure---came rarely enough to him, and in the dry torment of his long years he had learned to relish it when it came.

 _Desire will bloom where it finds soil._

He touched her face, felt the articulation of bones beneath her soft skin, and his lips joined hers in a meld of hot wet velvet. The touch of his lips moved through her, tightening and unwinding into a breathy hum. He kissed the side of her neck, breathing hard as her back arched, rocking the softness of her body against the shape of his confined cock. She pulled her dress up and off, letting it fall, and as he cupped her breasts in his hands and licked her nipples she drew in a sharp sweet breath, holding the back of his head. She got him out of his vest and pulled him into an embrace sealed with bare skin. Her subtle scent changed, acquiring a distinctive musk, and he licked the salt off her neck and offered his mouth and she lowered her face, kissing him with unrestrained savor; her tongue sought his, sliding past the depths of her own pleasure, spilling over into his own. He had been with many women, but only Dana filled the potentiality of her womanhood as Lugmokí did; only she had been permitted to unfurl the clenched rose-bud of it into full bloom, lush and magnificent in its power.

He drew her tight against him and she took up the length of his hair and untied it, loosening it from its plait, and she gathered up great soft handfuls of its dark silk and caressed her face with them. She poured her eyes down into his and caressed her breasts with his hair until he took it out of her hands and used it to rub the tips of her nipples. His eyes closed to her gasp and pressed his lips to the wild pounding pulse in her neck. He wanted to go into her, become swallowed and embraced by the red-pulsing darkness; he wanted to be in the place where the tension of lust became exquisite torture and the breaking took apart his bones and blood. The hot sea-salt scent of her cunt filled the room, seeping into his mind. He had always had to be so careful, so careful save a handful of times, those rare and wondrous memories. His long-ingrained need for care harnessed him, and Lugmokí unbuckled those self-imposed restraints: one warrior shedding another of his armor. He carried her to the bed and knelt at the edge of it, drawing her hips down, and she parted her knees, lifting the glistening dark hair of her cunt to his face.

She spread her lips apart to show him the rosy stiffness of her clit, and with a slight moan he took her buttocks into his hands and leaned down, curling his tongue around it. He closed his lips over her clit and sucked her, her fingers restless in his hair and her groans rich in his bones, and he spread her slippery lips with his tongue, rubbing her nub with his nose while his tongue dipped lower into her musky hole, licking up the bitter blade of her arousal, her swollen walls contracting and relaxing like a slow heart. She balanced her thighs on his shoulders, the flat muscles in her belly undulating, a slow motion that ground her clit into his laving tongue. Her breath came slow and deep, then quickened beneath the frantic pace of his tongue until she lifted herself, still and quivering, into his mouth. He unfastened his trousers and pushed them down, the firmness of his cock slapping him in the belly. He took hold of it, feeling it pulse in his fingers, and he stroked the hot skin, the shaft growing harder as he kissed the trembling tendons of her thighs, following the crease in her hip to her belly. He rested his face there, sucking on her skin, and he longed to devour her with himself, for her to become him, and to be consumed by her. She was a twin seen whole in shards of broken glass. His teeth closed on the curve of her hip-bone.

She hummed a smile at the sensation of his teeth, her legs stretching, and she moved out from beneath him and climbed backward on the bed, taking hold of his hair and giving a gentle tug. He smiled and climbed up onto the bed. She smoothed the blanket for him, and when he had relaxed his full stature she brought her face in close to his and kept it there, mingling their breaths before kissing him. He moved a hand around her neck and across her throat, fingers light and trailing, and he traced the length of one hard nipple as she kissed the side of his chin and went for his neck. She licked his pulse and sucked the curve of his shoulder, moving her mouth over the arch of his throat until he felt his insides soften.

She played with his nipples until they grew hard and she lowered the hot wet cavern of her mouth over them and breathed on the skin, flicking with her tongue until he twisted beneath her and began to moan, high breathless sounds that rose up from the pit of his belly and stormed in his throat. She bit them and lightning struck his lungs. She moved down to his cock and its veined skin swelled into her mouth, pushing back against the strength of her tongue. He tossed his head back into the pillow, moaning long and hard, his hands on her head as he lifted his hips. He was ravenous; a terrible ache rooted in his groin, howling for release, the song of a thousand starving mouths and all of them sticky with the taste of her cunt. She pressed her tongue up the underside and tightened her lips on the flare of the head, lingering, lashing the juncture of head and shaft with her tongue until a dangerous tremor came into his thighs.

“I’ll not last if thou dost not stop.” He gripped the back of her neck. “I want to be inside thee!” She turned servitude into the last steps in a dance of seduction, and he did not want her serving him. He wanted to look in her eyes as she took him in. He wanted to feel the gripping spasm of her pleasure before he lost himself to the white flame of the night. “Hells _Gods_!” he gasped, arching his throat. “Now!”

She moved astride him, and guided him inside. Her mouth softened at the sensation of sinking all the way down, her head rolling back. She let out a soft moan and his hands tightened on her thighs. In that moan her shadows in her mind melted away just enough to show him a taste of the woman she had been at the time of her making: fierce and hungry, beautiful and soft, all things new on her skin, and beneath that he felt Mordor buried in her bones, her Mordor, a place of stark beauty and heat with the scent of sunlight rising out of stones, mingling with dust and flowers; he saw stars like Silmarils in a black velvet sky over a land that looked desolate but wasn’t---there were hidden flowers and places of sweet water, purple shadows, spice-scented trees, and small animals coming forth to greet a dawn of many colors. She seated her bones against his. He cupped the hair on her cunt and used his thumb to tease apart the lips and she rubbed her clit against him. Her breath rose and fell as she rocked, her inner muscles tightening. He groaned and thrust. Being in her was like being swallowed.

With her quickening movements and the sweet rising agony of her moans came an overwhelming scent of masculine skin, hair redolent of sandalwood and sweat, and in that scent lived all the clanging dreams of a sleeping forge, her sinewy desire rising toward the tremendous will of an ancient flame; her lust to take and be taken, the dizzying need of her skin turned inside out. Vanimórë sank into her silken emptiness and felt all the places where Sauron lived, each cell, each part of each cell, _her_ Sauron, He who knew all of the secret ways into her raw sweet anguish, _He_ in her mind, the capitalized _He_ : god of her cunt. She melted herself and her maker through him, irrefutable and powerful as the roots of plants made eager by rain. She slammed down once, twice, and her breath caught, hanging as her spine curved. In the deep quivering clench she took hold of Vanimórë’s forearms and whimpered, her bones shaking, the explosion of her voice startling her into a backward arch. Her hair brushed his knees. Her rain fell upon his cracked and bitter soil. The muscles in her thighs stood out. Her belly pulsed. She growled.

“Yes,” and then, his voice like a tortured man’s, “ _more_!”

In the long blind explosion he heard his own torn voice. He rushed into her: thought, bone, opened veins, and the sum of what he was poured into his seed. Her body sang around the pounding of his release and it subsumed him, made a double heartbeat of his orgasm. His hands tightened on her hips and pulsed again and she drank up all the gathered frustrations, all of his ruthless, gnawing hunger. It racked him in ecstasy so profound that it bled into agony and she was there, outside of his skin and inside of it, holding him in her breath, smoothing him down with warm fingers. The last of it passed through him in a sweet and drowsy wind, lulling his clamoring blood, and she fell over him like a dusk of moist skin and blessed him with her hair and sleepy smile and a single panting kiss that tasted of brimstone. A scent of dreams came in off the desert, wrapped up in starlight and the memory of heat.

Then…sleep.


	4. Coldagnir

He could faintly see glints of the fire through the trees as he turned back.

This is what thou shouldst have been, Vanimórë had said, Beautiful, warm. A comfort. And we all have need of comfort. But do not be afraid to take it also.

Words of advice from some-one whom had also been so alone. Perhaps there could be comfort.

A snow weighted branch let slip its cold cloak and powdery snow puffed up about his feet.

He went blind for a disorienting moment, and the black-and-white of a winter night flamed into gold. Tiny, hard grains crumbled against his teeth as he snapped his mouth shut.

He felt heat on the back of his head and turned.

The sun was blazing from a sky free of cloud, save far away where a puffy white line drifted, idle and rainless. For a moment, a dreadful moment, he thought of the dusty wasteland beyond Angband, which had been green before the battle that sent fire raging across it. But no...no, please, he thought. Angband had been a spur of the Iron Mountains, and a cold land. The dust had been grey and brown. This place was pale as if the hammer of the sun had beaten out the color. And the sun had never shone with such strength in the north.

Coldagnir's breath started again, wary and shallow, and he reached out with his mind.

 _Glorfindel?  
_

 _Fëanor?  
_

 _...Vanimórë?  
_

 _Where am I?_

As far as his eye could reach he saw only the undulating pallor of this strange, waterless place.

It is desert, he thought out of a vision of long ago. He had never physically seen one, but he, like the Ainur had all been granted a vision of Arda, and Coldagnir remembered his wonder at the world. In some places, there had been deserts, and the Ainur had asked why this should be, for they were harsh places.

There is life and beauty in all things, Eru had said to them.

Slowly, he turned.

In the distance, rippling in heat-haze, was a city. It was a little below him, and he saw the greenery of trees beyond the great walls, a dotted line of them vanishing behind a curve of dune. That meant water, he thought, trying desperately to fix upon one thought through the scream of panic clamoring in his head. Where was he? Had Glorfindel or Vanimórë used their powers to send him here as punishment? He looked down at the clothes the Noldor had given him, cloth-soft doeskin, and wondered why they would clothe him if they meant to banish him. His feet were bare, and sand moved against them, hot and grainy.

He felt absolutely and completely alone, as adrift and shocked as he had when coming into Arda and Utumno.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, yet the sky remained blue.

A line of horsemen appeared on the ridge. They reined in and he felt their eyes on him. They were swathed in light robes with twists of material above their brows, and veils covering the lower half of their faces. He saw the glint of spears and, on some of their outstretched arms sat hooded birds. He was utterly exposed and did not move as they came down the slope toward him. And he did not call out again. For their own reasons, although Coldagnir had hoped and believed that they saw him as no threat, either Glorfindel or Vanimórë had sent him to this strange place.

Two men walked their mounts toward him, leveling spears. One of them spoke and the language was strange to him, although something in it felt familiar. He thought that if he listened he could untangle it into a tongue he recognized, but he understood the tone of their minds immediately. They were curious, a little suspicious and wary.

“Where am I?” he asked, falling back into Black Speech. “Where is this?”

The weapons remained pointed at his chest, but a silence fell. With a jingle of harness another rider moved forward. Above a fine veil, weighted with tiny, semi-precious stones, long-lashed dark eyes were outlined in smoky-black.

“Who are you?” Asked the woman in the same tongue, carefully, as if it were a language learned but little spoken. “Answer me.”

“I am...Coldagnir.” He added, “Lady.” For her bearing demanded respect, and the riders around her were clearly an escort. He had not seen a woman accorded such treatment for a long time.

Nymashúzet, he thought. Utumno and Angband. It was exceedingly rare.

“And where do you come from?” When he said nothing – could not think of anything to say that she would believe, the spear-points pressed against his flesh. They were extremely sharp, putting to flight his hope that this was a dream.

“North,” he said. “From the north.”

“North lies the Mirror of Fire,” she jerked her chin. “Even the tribes-people of the deep desert do not travel alone, without water or camel or protection from the sun. Certainly your skin marks you as northblood, but even they would not be so stupid. What are you?”

He thought of immense halls and dark fire, of whips and blood and falling cities, of burned bodies and pain. His lips parted. He looked beyond the woman, the riders, straight into the sun. He did not know that his eyes burned like metal with reflected light, but he felt the jerk of a spears, a cold pain as steel opened his flesh.

“He is demon,” said some-one, and inwardly he laughed in bitter agreement.

“I have heard of the demons of the north,” the woman sounded thoughtful, but unafraid. Coldagnir sensed her emotions in a strange, melting rush into his mind. She was used to the trappings and duties of power. There was fear there, but repressed, not to be shown before her people. “Bring him,” she ordered. “It seems you bleed,” she noted and he felt the dampness of blood under his breast, soaking into the tunic. “So perhaps you can die. Harm any here and we will test that theory.”

“I can die, lady,” he said. And did not want to, even here, cast again into the unknown, he did not want to go into the Void. The sand under his feet, the sun on his face were keen sensations of pleasure. “I will not harm any-one. I only want to know where I am.”

She made a brief gesture and Coldagnir stood still as men surrounded him. They were all armed, with swords for the most part, though some of the riders bore short bows, and beautiful long-legged coursers watched him from the dune-crest, plumed tails raised in alertness.

“Come now, enough! How many are with you?”

“None.”

“Really,” she said, sand-dry. “So, you have walked across the Mirror of Fire alone?”

“No. I...” He shook his head. “I do not know, lady, I was somewhere else. In the north. There was snow...and...then I was here.”

The one who had called him a demon moved closer to the woman and spoke in their tongue, softly. She listened, and nodded, then raised her head again.

“Demon or no, the men of the north are restless and there is talk of war,” she said. “It is known they have ado with the Old Race. And you might be one.” Her brows lifted, but he was silent. Old Race? She thought him an Elf? Perhaps it would be easier to pretend he was. “My city awaits the arrival of the Lady Lugmokí,” she went on. “I think you should avail yourself of my...hospitality until she arrives.”  
She swung her horse away with an easy movement.

“Who is the Lady Lugmokí?” he asked and she paused and looked over her shoulder.

“Queen of Mordor,” she sounded as if she were wearying of his pretended ignorance, thought he was lying. “The Mouth of Sauron. Bring him.”

“Sauron,” he whispered. From the brief history Glorfindel had imparted to him, Sauron was gone from the world. “Is not Sauron destroyed?”

“Destroyed?” The woman's voice hardened. She spurred ahead then, light robes swirling like mist. Coldagnir, in deepening confusion, quickened his pace and the men closed in behind him.

* * *  


The palace occupied the center of the city, which had grown up around it like onion-skins.

The noise and scents bombarded Coldagnir as everything did since his awakening, his changing. He felt as if his skin, his mind, were thin and sensitive, absorbing everything. They entered upon a wide road, where the white-clad warriors drew in about their lady and walls rose each side, blank and windowless. Perhaps, he thought, like the passages to Melkor's throne-halls in Utumno and Angband, this street had been especially made as a royal road. It passed through great gates flanked by towers where sentries patrolled, and then houses opened each side, and these too, stood behind walls, but he glimpsed, through an open gate, a fountain, trees with their roots in great planters.

And then a final gate opened and closed behind them and a court opened before him. He heard running water, felt it, deep down in the earth, deep and cool, allowing men to live in this place of unforgiving heat. He scarcely had time to look around, was hurried after the lady, through halls and another smaller court and at last, into a chamber.

Later, he sat alone. There had been a sunken bath, where he was watched by both men and women guards. He was informed that any violence within the palace would be construed as an act of war and dealt with accordingly. He would not be killed, but he would be disabled. If he behaved in a civilized fashion, he would be treated in like manner.

After the bath, he was provided with clothes and refreshment. Another woman had come then, and announced herself as Bijett, one of the Queens ministers who dealt with foreign matters. She too spoke Black Speech, and proceeded to question him. Names of lands mentioned by Glorfindel and others he had never heard of tumbled into his mind like seeds with no soil to cling to, but Coldagnir knew she was trying to have him admit he was an intelligencer working for Gondor, or for the Old Race. All he could say was that he was no spy, that he did not know how he had come here.

Bijett was attended by guards and although she seemed older than the queen, her wariness was less well-hidden. It seemed that they sensed he was not a man, but did not know how to place him, so believed him an Elf, though Bijett said no-one she knew of had ever seen one. He spoke quietly, tucked all her words away to think of later, and exhibited no behavior that might alarm. And it was an effort. He needed to know where he was, and wanted to know why he was here. At last, dissatisfied, Bijett rose from the divan.

“You are not telling the truth, or not all of it,” she said. “But neither have you offered violence and are carrying no weapons.” They had made sure of that when they stripped him. “It is possible that whomever sent you wanted you within the palace, of course. It is possible that you are an assassin, and so the Queen has decided to keep you safe until Lugmokí of Mordor arrives. She has eyes that can see.”

The guards fell around her as she pointed to the archway.

“You are permitted to walk in the court. But note that it is walled, and there are archers there, and outside the door.”

“I understand,” he said, and wished he did.

Neither the queen nor the minister had believed him, he thought, as night bloomed outside and seeped into the room bringing with it the scent of sweet flowers, and more faintly the odor of the city: people, spices, the gathered heat of the day now exhaling. But he had not been manhandled, and his quarters were more suited to a guest than a prisoner. He could not leave, but anyhow, he did not know where to go. Perhaps he could have forced an escape, in his old form, or when he had become accustomed to this one, the one he thought of as his first body.

Sauron had not been destroyed. Had Glorfindel lied to him? And why – so that Coldagnir would not seek out Melkor's Lieutenant? Perhaps. He had known Sauron of course, but here he was confused again, delicately feeling, senses as tender and cautious as young shoots. Yes; he felt Sauron, strongly, but not near. It was a vital and strong life-force, but...

It has been a long time. Thousands of years, Glorfindel said, and I do believe that. If Sauron survived this long, then he indeed might be different.

There was no drift against him that tasted of Melkor, however, and he registered that with relief.

He rose and walked to the archway. A desert place. A woman who ruled, and women as warriors? He knew no land like this, yet they were familiar with Sauron. They treated him civilly but considered his apparent ignorance a lie he held to so as not to betray whomever had sent him.

Why had he been sent here? Glorfindel had wanted him to remain with the Elves, to learn. Fëanor had agreed, or seemed to...Fëanor.. Heat surged in his face and a lamp caught, welling soft light into the room. Vanimórë's words came back to him: Thou wert too trusting and naive.

Perhaps he had been, indeed. He felt a hollow laugh in his throat and turned back. Had he been sent here to learn?

He saw a shallow bowl of flowers, a jug, a cup, a long handled mirror. It took him a moment to put a name to the object (he had owned no mirrors in either Utumno or Angband) and he picked it up, staring back at his own face, shadowy and darkened. He touched the metal surface, then his skin, tentatively: white flesh, red hair still damp, drawn over one shoulder, eyes wide with barely controlled fear. They looked oddly metallic, but perhaps it was the quality of the mirror. He pressed the bone under his cheek, then pushing aside the neck of the robe and traced his breast and stomach to his groin. The hard muscles quivered and he enjoyed the sensation. Lifting back one wide sleeve, he examined his arm. He had seen himself in Utumno, once, reflected in water and had jerked away from it. He had thought that a black fire was consuming him from within. And it had been.

This is how I was. He folded his fingers about his throat, remembered Gothmog’s great hand there, and glanced at the lamp, alive by his thought. He slammed down the mirror.

Vanimórë was the last person he had spoken to. Sauron’s son, come into great power. Had Vanimórë decided to send him away?

He called out, a blade of desperation pressing against the walls of his mind. And he thought he felt something, a brief, puzzled flicker, like that of a man catching sight of some-one he thinks he knows.

And then there was nothing but the scented night.

* * *  


The queen had dismissed all her attendants save one, Yala, whom had been with her since childhood. There was none more absolutely loyal, and it was pleasant, in her brief times of solitude to speak of small things, to have Yala brush her hair with long, soothing strokes. Soon Néma would sleep, but she lingered, hoping for the expected tap upon the wall.

When it came, Yala moved to a set of hangings, and drew them back, exposing a narrow door pressed into the wall. She unlatched it.

The woman who came through was clad unobtrusively, trews tucked into soft boots which, hair caught back. She went down on one knee. Néma gestured for her to rise.

“Tell me.”

The spy was well trained. There was no quiver in her voice as she related what she had seen. The queen glanced at Yala.

“Send for Bijett,” she said.

The minister came quickly. She had not been in bed, she explained.

“You are sure?” she asked the spy.

“I am, lady. The guest sat for some time in the dark. He did not light the lamps and my eyes were adjusted to it. I could see his pallor. Sometimes it seemed to shimmer a little, but that may have been the light from the courtyard. He was sitting upon the bed, and did not move, but the lamp caught alight and burned up. He did not appear to notice.”

“What did he do then?” Bijett leaned her hands on her knees.

“He picked up a mirror and looked in it. He seemed to examine himself, his face his body, as if he had never seen himself before.”

“He is still being watched?”

Néma nodded. “As he will be until the Lady Lugmokí arrives. What do you think?”

“What I think, lady, will be confused by myths and tales from the north. He could be one of the Old Race. But if he has been sent as a spy then they are fools. He stands out like a bloodstain on the sands. And either he is very good at dissimulation or something very strange is happening here. And looking at him, I think the latter. Let Mordor deal with it, they at least have experience in such things. And though I saw no hint in his movements of threat, that may be because he would not use traditional means of aggression.”

“I agree,” the queen said. “Watch him closely. Kill him...if necessary. He is not from Mordor, that much is plain, and if he endangers any of my people I will act. And I think he can be harmed, whatever he is.”


	5. The Memory Of Heat

Past dusk the lamps called them home, high on the walls of the queen’s city; Lugmokí’s train of warriors and provisions swayed toward the opening gates.

Thrice-Fierce, thought Lugmokí, her eyes moving across the walls. She is awake.

Vanimórë looked at her.

“A balrog dens in the place Elf-kind calls Moria,” said Lugmokí. “She wakes. It is the strange energy here, I imagine. It is like hers, but not. This makes her curious.” It makes me curious as well.

Vanimórë shifted his reins. “Nymashúzet.”

“Aye.” Lugmokí looked at him over her veil. “Nymashúzet.”

The caravan passed through the gates and a swarm of servants fell upon them. Lugmokí dismounted and Vanimórë followed, elegant in his movement as a cat. Lugmokí handed over her reins. “You know her, then.”

“Nymashúzet?”

“I hear the familiarity in your voice.” I see it in your mind as well. Lugmokí glanced at him. What is she to you?

“Yes, I know her.” She is naught to me but a barbarous memory.

A beautifully garbed woman approached. “Your rooms have been prepared, lady. Come with me and take rest.” Her eyes flicked to Vanimórë and Lugmokí heard the question in her mind. “This is my companion," she said. "His name is Vanimórë and he hails from the north. I trust there is room for him too?”

She blushed. “Oh, yes of course, lady. Please come. Both of you.”

***

She dreamed of the thin skies over the mountains, a gasping shade different from the dense atmospheres of the low places, a sky blacker than all others when night has fallen for the mountains are among the highest in Arda, and they are the coldest, and inside their hollow belly is her home. She smelled the flames of the torches, the oil splintering into heat and light, and knew their struggle against the thin air; she felt their allegiance to her, their longing to crawl across her skin, even as she felt her deep longing for [i]Him [/i]press her feet into the earth.

This is her favorite dream.

She turned her back on the cold of Aboveworld’s bitter skies and strode into the navel of Thangorodrim. She felt the gates open for her, parting for her presence alone. There was welcoming darkness, and flame-ridden shadows, and they swirled aside and curtsied to her descent, following her in a retinue past the outer rooms, past the prisons, past the quarters, until the beating heart of gravity thudded against the soles of her feet. She smelled the frankincense and sulfur dreams of her fellow balrogs and the wings of their fëar brushed through the roots of her hair. The air was rich. The walls held Morgoth’s body heat. The ceilings were heavy and strong.

I am. Power filled her skin to bursting. Smoke curled out of her pores. I AM. I am Nymashúzet, Thrice Fierce in the Valarin tongue of old, Ghashumai in the tongue of Mordor, the flower out of flame. I am she; I am She.

The flame of memory bit into fresh wood and there was sweeping fire, blistering heat climbing the sides of mountains, leaves and roots and flesh succumbing to the relentless seduction of combustion. Thin curling flames climbed up the backs of her arms, dainty and bright, licking at the lobes of her ears, following the ornate shapes carved into her skin. They marched over the tattooed markings on her face and rose straight up from her cheekbones, wreathing her eyes in a bright veil. The wind of her stride stretched the flames backward and they slid up over her forehead, making a fiery cloak of her hair. Orcs, Elves, and others were buried in the shadows and awe-filled eyes crawled on her like flies. Her smile grew feral within the immolated grandeur of her appearance.

In this dream, she went into the heart of the mountains where He was, where there is always room for all of her burning chaos, and He always needs her flames on His skin and her gunpowder breath in His mouth, in His eyes, on His prick; on Him, in Him, her massive heat baking the stone and her nails striking sparks and the air rippling and her cunt folded out of the white-hot skins of stars and…

It was a pleasure to burn.

Was.

In her disorientation the dream wavered, tattering into ash. She came back into time, feeling the deep cold of the mithril-veined walls and the endless darkness of the mines. A strange energy lit in the center of her mind. Her blood roused, hauling her consciousness to the fore, and as the last of her memory receded her anger exploded. Her eyes flared open. The walls trembled.

WHO DARES DISTURB ME FROM MY SLEEP?

It skittered away. She reached out across the long miles and touched familiar hues: Sauron, Lugmokí, the Deathless still huddling in Middle-earth, those who called themselves wizards.

Nymashúzet threw off the last wisps of sleep. She rose into her cold cave and for the first time in thousands of somnolent years she thought about the world beyond the walls of stone.

***

The sun flung spears of light across eastward. It struck the city walls and sliced into the streets, shattered against the palms and poured over the irrigated fields of the oases villages, melted into gold on the desert beyond.

There came the sound of doors unbarring, the pad of boots on tile as guards entered Coldagnir's chambers and set down food. Apparently, it was deemed too risky to have servants bring him his meals, and since his arrival, the palace guards had taken on that duty. They watched him carefully, backed out and the door was shut behind them. He had noted there was no way of locking it from this side.

The taste of food, wine, water, was delicious. Despite the pulse of fear and confusion in him, he felt everything with near-painful intensity: the stone under his feet, the slide of soap and cloth over his skin, the strengthening rays of the sun. He tore a piece of flat bread, dipped it into a bowl of soft, herb cheese and ate, the flavors melting on his tongue. The fruit burst in his mouth, and the cool water seemed to penetrate his gullet and stomach and flow through its walls into his veins.

He finished, walked out into the walled court. Birds flew to the small central fountain to drink, hot-colored flowers burst and frothed over the lips of bowls. It was a peaceful place, but the walls were clean of even the smallest shrub that might provide a handhold, and sentries watched from small towers, at times moving slowly from one to the other, their eyes upon him.

He moved under the colonnade, thinking of the familiarity he had touched: Sauron strangeness, the spark of Vanimórë's spirit that had blinked away. He was certain now, that it was Vanimórë whom had used his powers to send him away. Hurt and anger mounted within him and he did not attempt to reach Sauron's son again, nor any of them. His life had been spared that he might be punished, he guessed, or sent far from the Elves so that if he reverted to what he had been he would be no danger to any-one. His confrontation with Fëanor had troubled them. But he had been willing to die rather than become a Balrog of Angband again.

Angband was gone, but the echoes remained, tracing through his memories; a thundercloud of power. He had dwelled longer in Utumno, but Angband was a citadel built for conquest and war. From there Melkor had sent forth his armies. To Coldagnir, Angband meant fire and slaughter.

Somewhere in him, he felt an eye open to a presence familiar as Melkor's, more ancient than Vanimórë's. A memory-fist struck him and hurled him back to those great halls under the fuming mountains, to black rock shaped by the mind of a God out of passion and curses. It melted red and gold with light, and fire writhed up pillars as vast as primal trees, framing her passage, sinuous and deadly, a terrible beauty that gloried in the very essence of what she was. She swept past.

Nymashúzet. A force; passionate in her burning, and tallied him, his name. Balrog. Brother. Opposite.

Nemrúshkeraz.

He flinched back. The fountain plashed and the sun laid patterns through stone screens as precise as mosaic.

Nymashúzet.

Where?

***

"Nymashúzet," Vanimórë felt her awakening as a fire blazing up on a dark mountain. "She feels as she did in my world. I must be insane to feel some relief in that."

They had been lead to cool, beautiful chambers; Lugmokí's, he guessed, while they found him his own as her companion.

The palace reminded him of Sud Sicanna, the city as prosperous, as loud with commerce and many tongues.

He had become more accustomed to the presence of women, even those with Orkish blood, on the journey here, watched them with a professional eye that fell again and again into curiosity when he considered how Orcs were viewed in his own world, even by men who allied with Sauron. There were different breeds of Orcs, it was true, from the smaller ones who dwelled in Gram or Gundabad in the Towers of Mist, to the Great Orcs of Barad-dûr, who rose to captaincy under Sauron, but he would not have imagined such offspring, even by remove. The maulobí disturbed him, not because they were women, but because they were civilized, attractive and carried Orc blood.

Lugmokí disturbed him in a different way. He could follow the threads of his concern to a certain point where they tangled into a knot. He thought of sex without reason and for a thousand reasons, sex without restraint, without caution, of being eaten and relishing it. He smiled without knowing it, a smile stripped of irony or self mockery, a smile few had ever seen, spontaneous, brilliant.

And here, in this city, there were women guards and women in positions of power and the as yet unseen queen. They – and the men – wore veiling against the sun and sand, but in the city he had seen their faces uncovered, and here in the palace they moved with casual assurance. Yet, for all these differences, the sense of Nymashúzet was the one he knew from his younger days in Angband. Known. Familiar.

I was so damned young!

"I did not understand the balrogs," he admitted. "I did not want to. I was too busy trying to stay alive. They were power, like Melkor, like my father. They had known what was before, and yet they had come to Angband. I saw no reason in that, no sense even. What freedom was there for them? Angband was stupendous. I never saw a third of it, not even that, but below the earth, it was – to me – a prison. The lands were cold around it. What had they given up, the Balrogs, the others who became spirits within the bodies of great wolves? to come into Arda, to Angband? I thought them trapped as surely as I was, but of their own choice. Yet there were some, like Gothmog and Nymashúzet, and Sauron, who loved what they were. Truly loved it."

He sipped at the juice, freshly squeezed and tasting of the sun.

"She enjoyed Melkor. That in itself was incomprehensible to me. Unless it was also a different Melkor of course." And the irony returned. "or she embraced what he was." He put the cup down, watching Lugmoki's face.

"My first tutor in arms was an Elf. When I was proficient I was pitted against Great Orcs, wolves, Balrogs. They were not death matches, not against Balrogs. They were the last test, shall we say. I knew them through that, through the times I was summoned to Melkor. I did not know them. But Nymashúzet, I remember well."

***

“It is here as it is there.” Lugmokí glanced into her cup. “Sauron and Nymashúzet know each other of old, but I do not know the intimate details of those days for she has spent many long years asleep, and Sauron has not spoken to me of them.”

“Perhaps our Saurons are not so different.” His voice was dry. “There was much he did not share with me, also.”

She put the cup down and took a deep breath.

“I don’t know that Melkor would be so different in your world as he is in this one,” she continued, looking into his face. “He was a god of war and chaos, of free will and destruction. Is, as he is not ended, since gods do not end, though he may be beyond this world and others like it. Melkor carved a place into existence for those things. That Nymashúzet and others of her kind should be drawn to him is not surprising. He gave her a place and a purpose in the world.” Her voice gained a subtle edge. “What would the Valar make of Nymashúzet? In their deathless world where nothing withers and there is no decay? And yet she is, the way Melkor is. It was a flaw in the design of the Valar that Melkor should be cast out. Ilúvatar made the world to remake itself. There is no creation without destruction.”

She rose and went to her window, her feet stirring in sudden restlessness. Vanimórë watched her. Moonlight silvered the shape of her body. He shook his head.

“The world,” he said, “is capable of healing itself, yes, although it may take time beyond our counting. Thou wouldst say Nymashúzet is a natural force taken form? Not evil, not good, something that simply is? I agree, but she is a force of great power and Melkor came to a world trodden by creatures who cannot always heal when they are marred: Elves and Men. He pitted the powers of a God, and spirits of might, against the Children of the Earth. Thou might say that Men and Elves leave offspring, and in the greater vision, their deaths are as insignificant as the deaths of mosquitoes. I have fought in many wars, and seen many deaths. I have slain and sat in judgment upon criminals. I cannot make myself believe that Men or Elves should war against a firestorm, or the hate of a God. Arda should not be a battleground for Powers.”

“Who is to say such? You? I?” She uttered a silken little laugh and gave him her profile. “Where else would he go following an exile from Aman? Indeed, what place would such as Melkor have in a deathless realm? If he had stayed in Aman death would’ve come to Aman, and yet Aman is to remain deathless until the unmaking of the worlds.” She rested her hands on the sill. “It is not more than a drama wrought by Ilúvatar.”

“Yes,” he said. “I say so, for I live among men although I am as deathless as an Elf. And where could Melkor go? Well, it seems perhaps anywhere. In my Arda I think Men prefer not to have their gods thrust upon them.”

“I think the preferences of Man or Elf matter little in the widest view of things.”

“As for the Valar, they offered me sanctuary once, after the Last Alliance. Freedom. Peace. On their terms. I rejected them. What damn use they are, I have no idea. Their war against Melkor sank the lands and no doubt killed as many as all his wars.” He unraveled his braided hair. “I have no use for any Power, Lugmokí. They hit too hard. Perhaps if there are many worlds, there is a place strong enough for them, but it is not here, or rather, not the Arda I came from. If it was so, then why would Nymashúzet sleep?”

A night-wind caught Lugmokí’s hair and she became a shadow shrouded in swirling smoke. “She sleeps to dream of better days.”

“What I saw in Angband was an abomination to me. Perhaps one would have to be power indeed, to take esoteric pleasures in such things. Perhaps Nymashúzet and those like her consider the Children of Eru merest curiosities, or toys to play with and break without consideration.”

“I don’t doubt you, nor do I doubt your memories of your own world, but it is difficult for me to understand your hate.” In a sinuous move, she turned her back on the darkened sky and drifted around behind his chair. She put her hand on his hair. “It’s difficult for me to know it. I’ve never known such hatred in myself. Sauron carries his hatred of the Valar, and I share in his disdain of them, but it’s not the same. No one has ever raised a savage hand to me.” She let the hand trail as she stepped away, running the thickness of his hair through her fingers. “I’m sorry that I don’t understand. I wish I could. I wish it with all that I have and all that I will be.”

“Do not wish it,” he said, very quiet. “The fact that thou doth wish to is enough.”

She looked at him over her shoulder. Light from a brazier made shadows on her face. “Yet wishing will not make it so. Yet you would ask about freedom, and wonder at the freedoms found in such a place as Angband, beneath the hand of one such as Melkor, and I answer you this: if one offered you the freedom to be the measure of who you are, and offered such without fetters or hidden consequences…would you take it?”

He crossed one leg over the other. “Then why did not Melkor offer me that freedom?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was not part of his design? It was not part of yours? We are all the playthings of gods. You may as well as a child why he loves the toy boat and not the little carved horse.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I certainly have been a plaything of Gods. And I do not like their games. Nor do I understand them. I might know a man’s arm can heal if I break it, but I do not choose to do it out of curiosity or boredom. Perhaps one must be a God to understand them. But now, one whom in my Arda, and perhaps in this, would be worshiped as a Goddess, has awoken. I have not known of any Balrogs since Angband’s destruction, save she. The dwarves woke her, mining the deep lodes of Mithril.” And many fled Lórien, and thus I met a pregnant Elf-woman...

Lugmokí turned around. She moved her hair aside and looked at him.

“But she slept again. If Sauron called her then, I do not know. But she sleeps no more.” He reached to take her hand and traced the veins that showed lavender under her white skin, still trying to think of her as something Sauron made. Does it matter? I do not know. No. I think not. “Sauron must feel her. We must learn why she wakes from hundreds of years of sleep.”


	6. Lukmokí's Dream

 

Coldagnir heard the guards beyond the doors. They did not speak often, but at times some-one would pass, giving them orders, and they would change watches. He felt their minds, although at first he was gentle and cautious, and it was surprisingly easy. He caught glimpses, heard whispers, and he learned when the emissary from Mordor arrived. He had spent these days trying to garner what bare information he could.

The approach of the two minds – two, the one that was Vanimórë and whom he closed himself from – could be likened to the drawing near of two fires. They surmounted the others about him like coals in a dark hearth and they pressed themselves into his awareness with the authority of their imprint upon Time. The others he knew were further away, and the alien feel of Sauron prevented him from seeking further.

Then there was Nymashúzet...whom he had known longer than Sauron, in Utumno, then Angband. If any other Balrogs inhabited Middle-earth, they slept as he had slept.

First Utumno...

 _So thou hast chosen to embrace freedom, Nemrúshkeraz.  
_

 _This is not freedom.  
_

 _Is it not?_ Words on his skin, hair like teasing whips. _Feel it._

And then Angband, after Fingolfin’s death, when Morgoth was, for a time, both roused and sated by victory. Nymashúzet. Laughing fire, rock blushed to gold and rose in her raging delight at being, at burning.

A sunrise underground. Nymashúzet singing the magnificat of flame.

Her memories. His own.

 _“Thou wouldst not have had freedom in the world of men. They use thy fire, but they put it in stone, in earth, to control it. They can burn their hands through carelessness. They would have feared thee. Hated thee.”  
_

 _“Destruction was not my purpose.”  
_

 _“Yet destruction_ has _a purpose.”_

He remembered that place where pain became ecstasy, where surrender was an act of will and worship.

Every lamp in the room burst into life, hissing as they fed on oil, eager and voracious.

There was no wind in the chamber, and all their flames streamed north.

***  


 _And thus the queen, Naiut, seeing Borshiva-Dar aflame and hearing the cries of the people as the men of Gondor ravaged the city, turned as trumpets were heard in the morning, and Mordor came honoring the old alliance. For behold! Mordor had crossed even the desert..._

The lamp flame wavered. Vanimórë lifted his head and stared into the dark corners of the room. He had been conducted to chambers adjacent to Lugmokí’s, and he asked for books of history. Following his bath he found scrolls on his desk, the wooden spools smooth with much handling and dense with small, precise writing. He had poured wine from a carafe and sat at the desk and begun to read.

This is not my world, he thought again. Perhaps seeing it inscribed here, the differences in this history, a past that had never happened in his own Arda, consolidated his acceptance of it. He rose. In Mordor sat a Sauron that was not his own father, but was like him in many ways. Vanimórë felt both repelled and tempted by this knowledge. The loss of the mind-link was a strange emptiness, a difficult freedom.

The hum of the city had faded to that of a drowsy hive. There would still be people in the streets, but many slept now. Lugmokí drowsed, as he did, not quite awake, not asleep, but without his clenched tension. There were no other minds like her in Sudu Cull, except that one, that hot yet tender energy she had sensed. It was hard to remember he had no authority here, but even had he, his curiosity would’ve gotten the better of him.

It is like Nymashúzet’s, but not, Lugmokí had said. This makes her curious.

It cannot be that much like hers, he thought. Balrogs were not passive; they could only be bound by something stronger. I would expect more violence.

But he had felt something as he fell into desire, during his long, dark-burning dive into Lugmokí, a call into his mind. Later it was gone, but he had not forgotten it. There were other minds he knew, far away that carried the scent of something known: Glorfindel, a star away to the north…Tindómion...Maglor. He did not seek Elgalad, just as he did not look to Mordor.

 _Whom art thou?_

He came up against a curtain of heat. Something hid behind it.

 _Very well_. He paced to the colonnade. He did not need to know whom. He knew what. And he had known all the balrogs.

Why was it hiding? He knew what they were, knew what they could do.

And then Vanimórë felt its mind blaze up, not at him, but at…

***  


Lugmokí didn’t require sleep the way others did, but just the same she enjoyed the evening ritual of releasing her mind from the day’s bonds and allowing her body the slow descent into deep rest.

She lay on her side, curled toward the window, and dozed. A wind blew in that smelled of the flowers in the courtyard and she drifted out of the harbor in her mind, touching all of the fëar of the city, feeling the murmurs of their discontent and their happiness. She held her mind to them the way one might hold chilled hands out to a fire. She rose toward the stars and looked down on the dreaming desert tucked in beneath its caul of darkness.

Fire flared up along the ridges of the dunes, carving wavy lines into the landscape like a woman’s hair. Wind canted the flames toward the north. Her mind flashed onto the sand. She felt its cold crystals beneath her feet.

 _Here it is_ , she thought. _Do I step into it?_

Yes.

She did, and she found herself in a place she had never seen save in the memory of Sauron’s words.

The Angband of Nymashúzet’s thought was both beautiful and strange: carved straight from the living rock by hands that owed no allegiance to hammer or chisel, every surface of stone gleamed with preternatural shine. Curves in the stone bent reflected flames into sinuous shapes. The open spaces trembled in amber light. This place was not the dark and fuming fortress of hatred she had touched in Vanimórë’s mind; here was a temple to darkness, an ode to the unbridled fulmination of chaos sung in the fluid beauty of underground stone, a fist of free will clenched tight in the belly of the earth.

Surrounded by Angband’s impression upon the mind of Nymashúzet, Lugmokí thought of the earthquakes that broke continents asunder and set them adrift, of islands built out of the earth’s spilled and molten blood, of the wrenching birth of mountain ranges and civilizations ripped apart from within in the blood-lust of revolution. All of the incoherent rage of the worlds at the usurping grip of life, the indifferent breath of death, the oppression of stunted instincts and blind minds, all of these things and still more yet unborn trembled in the rarefied air of black cathedral ceilings, held there like a flower in the open palm of the night. Being there filled her with an overwhelming desire to break the things that need breaking and burn the things that need burning and swallow down the spurting blood of her lust until…until…

Oh Eru, she thought.

Buried inside all of this, like the echo of a heartbeat, came the driving energy that cracks open the protective husk of a seed, that spreads it apart, the calamitous thunder that burns the way for new growth; it came, it was the pure imperative of coming, an inevitability of unstoppable destruction that didn’t rape the land but fucked it, yes, here is the heartbeat buried inside the pounding of bone on flesh on bone, the fucking, the slamming of blood, the ramming, the anger of life and the arrogance of it, the root tearing its way into the ground and rending apart the stones of her guts and pulling them out and the fire this is

 _Oh, Eru! Oh!_

Lugmokí arched out of sleep, hauled out of the darkness by her own voice crying out a sharp oath of surrender as her body bent and clenched and shuddered. The ecstasy pushed strange floods to the surface of her skin, and the sensation of sweat-droplets sizzled and set off small aftershocks that radiated out from her throbbing cunt. Inside her beads of oily sweat, Lugmokí smelled a lingering touch of brimstone and amber. She panted and turned her head and licked her shoulder. The taste burned in her mouth and quickened her breath, making her come again, a small cry of pushed-out limbs and an arched throat, hips tilted until they trembled, and then she fell back into herself like a shattering plate, thoughts and feelings scattering into the silence. She panted and put her hands over her face. Tears that smelled of dragon’s blood and resin hit her fingers and that too struck a chord in her clit, shivering hot in the tendons in her thighs.

“No more,” she gasped, pressing her wrists into her forehead. No more. No more. I can’t stand it.

Her breath quickened, held, broke into gasping. Her body stiffened. She bared her teeth. The long muscles started to quiver and pulses of pleasure fell through her like a shower of sparks. One by one they winked out. Her body twitched. She got out of bed and stumbled on weak knees. The cool air blew in through the open window, rousing her hair and rippling the bed’s netting. The languor moved over her in a wave. It turned her joints to water and her mind to silk. She sighed and smiled and moaned at the same time, sliding down onto her knees and spreading them until she could touch her forehead to the cool stone floor, and in her sweetness she felt the edge of her power and stroked it as one would stroke the flank of a sleeping cat. It purred but it was the kind of purring that wants to wake into a hungry growl.

 _Gods, this is dangerous. So very dangerous.  
_

 _Yes._ Sauron’s voice opened inside her mind. _Stay far from Thrice-Fierce’s reminiscence. Such memories are not for you.  
_

 _Do you know why she wakes?  
_

 _I know Nemrúshkeraz.  
_

 _Who?  
_

 _The fingerprint of Nemrúshkeraz slumbers in the court of Harad.  
_

 _So it’s another balrog.  
_

 _Yes._

***  


 _No._

Coldagnir backed away. The flames answered him and roared up, and in the silent scream at the core of the onrushing heat he saw the lamps break, hot glass flying like a shower of rubies. The thin drapes about the bed charred, smoked, blazed. He breathed it into him, every lick of the fire his horror had unwittingly unleashed, holding it, caging it, calming it. He retreated step by step and the cold stone of the court blossomed into warmth under his feet.

One of the night-guards looked down and saw him with hair like wreaths of flame, pale body wrapped in robes of fire. He uttered a curse like a sob, fitting an arrow to his bow. His companion said nothing. The first duty of a soldier was to serve and to protect their queen.

The arrow sang free. At that range it would hit the demon square in the throat.

A hand snapped out of the light and caught it. Hot bronze eyes stared up and the guard heard the small sound of the arrowhead falling from the shaft as the shaft charred into soot.

Coldagnir backed into an angle of the wall, retreating behind the barrier he had woven, and he whispered: “I will not serve Him again!”

***  


Vanimórë had seen brush fires eat across dry grassland, horrifyingly fast, impossible for a man to outrun. This felt the same. It reached him, washed over him, carried him down. It pounded him as Morgoth had, a force so titanic that his very self was lost under it. It was iron upon him, in him, and his mind contracted against it as it always had. Endure or die.

He looked up from his knees, a child faced by the mightiest Power on Arda.

 _Thou art always my Slave.  
_

 _Thou wilt not die. I have walked in the Void, it is my province, Slave, and there I will torment thee for eternity, if thou doth die. But my pleasures will not kill thee, half-breed. Thou art no Elf. Thy fate is not theirs._

Such a small thing he was under Morgoth’s hand, just a toy to pick up and cast away. Morgoth’s presence loomed over him like Thangorodrim’s peaks, inescapable and permanent as gut-rock. He was truly nothing to this immensity. A little thing.

 _I will not break!_ the youth had cried in piteous resolve. _I swear to thee, Morgoth, to my cursed father, to whatever powers exist. I will not break!_

Vanimórë’s hate rose up like a wall of steel-veined granite, built by himself in the darkness of despair and pain. He pushed himself upright, looked into the heart of the storm. When one could not run, there was nothing to do but face the onslaught. The youth inside him curled up in terror, crying _no, no, no!_ but the man he had become braced him. Slowly the chamber became solid about him. Every lantern and every candle was afire, burning white and ferocious. With sharp cracks, the lamp-glass exploded; the candles gorged their wicks down into liquid wax. Vanimórë willed his muscles to stiffen, to take him from his room and out into the night.

There was a red glow against the sky, as if some-one had lit a huge bonfire in one of the courts, yet there was no upward whirl of smoke and sparks.

Of course not.

 _Morgoth. Bloody Morgoth._

He heard himself swearing, his oaths concise and colorful, as he strode to Lugmokí’s rooms. She knelt beside the unmade bed, eyes wide and dark in the oval shield of her face. Hair clung to her cheeks. He smelled the strength of her fermented musk overlaid by sweet burned spices, the cool air of the desert, melted steel, and stone. Her shoulders were damp under his fingers. For a moment, twin suns looked back from her eyes, and then she blinked and the burnt amber scent of her breath faded. She turned her face and her body away from him.

“It’s another balrog,” she said. “That is what Néma is keeping here as a prisoner.”

 


	7. It Is Afraid

 

The fire was comforting, familiar and a protection against the soldiers’ weapons. Beyond its caul he heard their voices. They would come for him and shut him away, if they could. For a moment, he wished for it, to be put somewhere dark and silent, where he could sink back into age-long slumber and forget his fear and isolation.

If they imprisoned him...

 _Nymashúzet would find him._

She would come to the city like an arrow of fire. She would spill into alleyways and incinerate anything that stood between them. Perhaps she would have no choice. They were linked in ways which went beyond blood or birth or the names Elves or Men gave such kinships. They were Valaraukar, perhaps the only two left in Arda, and like seeks like.

 _She is coming._

It was not fear that spoke, but his sense of her, strengthening like fire eating dry tinder, voracious and pitiless. She was far away, Coldagnir knew, but he knew how swiftly and tirelessly Balrogs could run.

He remembered the battle the Elves called Dagor Bragollach and how it had shattered the Long Peace. There had never been peace in Angband, though its gates were shut and grass grew green upon Ard Galen; it was ever a place of fierce industry and clanging discontent and strategies left to ferment in the deep places of a lightless mind. There were Elves to the west and to the south, and they believed they had forged an iron leaguer about Angband, while within the forges pounded and the Orcs bred and Draugluin sired the fell-wolves with their massive shoulders and too-intelligent eyes. On that moonless winter night, Angband held an immense army.

But first, Melkor reached into the earth itself and sent forth fire.

Eruptions thrummed through Angband as the Iron Mountains belched lava, flinging gouts of it toward Varda’s stars, sending rivers of it across the soft flanks of grass. The threefold peaks belched forth clouds of sulfurous ash. The army poured forth, legion upon legion, breaking like waves upon the hapless and reckless alike, and Glaurung led the Balrogs in their surge against the enemy beneath a sky like burning blood. Nymashúzet’s battle-cry sounded in the deep chambers of

 _(Nemrúshkeraz I am I am and this is this is---the seduction of combustion)_

Coldagnir’s memory, a shriek wrought of thunder and breaking stone, and he remembered her furious joy and his slow terror at the loosening of her chains and knew the obscenity of Melkor’s delight at the fullness of her destruction.

They were a tide of death. Men and Elves withered, burned, died screaming. There was smoke and the stench of burned meat and grass and the river of destruction fumed on across the plain, roared up the walls of the mountains, turned trees into torches. There was a great wave of heat but it did not knock him down. A swarm of cinders rode the air. He was a cinder, blown by the war-storm...

 _Lies_. He had been a part of it: the storm, the death.

He flinched under the impassive glitter of the southern stars. Something within him shifted, as though Nymashúzet’s will pulled him toward her. He felt his name whispered, hot silk floating in her mind:

 _Nemrúshkeraz._

He moved, not knowing that he moved under a spur of panic, and he went up the wall like a cat trailing flame. He half-heard and ignored the cries of the guards as he leapt across their walkway, running, scaling the tower above. Arrows whined around him, striking the wall with a chink and falling back; one of them grazed his thigh but the soldiers were shocked and frightened, and their aim was poor. Within a moment he was out of their sight. He climbed to the highest parapet of the palace. The city opened below him. He stared north, needing no map to know where Nymashúzet dwelled, and turned his back. Had the inhabitants of Sudu Cull looked up that night, they might have glimpsed a running form of fire, a hot and bright wave cresting on the darkness. Cries of alarm rose into the streets, but there was no smell of burning, and most were uncertain of what they did see.

Coldagnir closed his mind to everything but the race. Sometimes he glimpsed dark gardens, felt their cool, scented air breathing upward before he leaped to another roof. The streets became narrow in the poorer quarter and he smelled the stench of tanneries, or penned animals, of spices and sewage. Here, he could easily jump across the alleys, gone before any-one could look up, but ahead of him rose the outer wall of the city, high and dotted with guard towers. And the guards were on watch. Horn calls had followed his flight and they held a message easy enough to interpret: stop him.

He gathered his power, swallowed it until the light was gone, and slipped down into a cramped, noisome court. A few rats scattered from him. He felt the air passing in and out of his lungs, the pull and stretch of muscle, even the wound-pain in his thigh, and there was delight in the sensations, but he had no time to dwell on them. The south gate of the city was closed.

 _Be dark. Be silent. Be still._

In the half-slumbering parts of his mind he heard luscious terrible laughter.

 _A balrog cannot hide. They know you, they taste your truth, and so do I._

This time with the fear came anger, overtaking it like one wave consuming another. All his hate, his anger, his terror became power; form and fire. It screamed light into his hiding place, set afire the piles of nameless rubbish, and he exploded into the street like a missile of blazing naphtha. He did not see the guards, did not hear the screams, as he licked up the great stone, a living, moving flame that flung itself out into the desert night.

And there was a bitter glory in being what he was.

He did not stop for a long time, but the silence of the desert gradually seeped into him and he slowed, then stopped. Now was the time for darkness, for silence. He cooled, drank in the fire, looked at the distant leak of pallor in the east that would soon bleed into dawn.

The massive surge of the sun called to him and he struggled against answering. To his right, his shadow stretched long and black. He looked at his hands, at the slice on his thigh. Not deep. Heat had burned it clean and it was scabbed over. I had to do it, he told himself, hating the pure joy the release of his power had brought him, as if it were a forbidden lover that he could not reject.

Sud Sicanna was a tiny shape, far away. Not far enough away. Nymashúzet would not go there now, he guessed and hoped. She had roused at his presence in the world, for he had not felt her before. Perhaps she had felt him as a weight on her long sleep, as he had felt whatever Vala had woken him.

 _Why am I here?_

He felt the whips of her hair, and the hot silk of her skin, and he thought of pleasure and pain and golden chains and everlasting temptation.

The sun was at its midpoint in the bleached sky when he found the tiny well among the rocks. It was old, for the stones were broken and blasted by heat, but some-one knew of it, for there was dry animal dung nearby, and a dipper tied by woven hide. There were no grasses, no trees, only this hole under a cliff and that was enough. He did not feel much thirst, or at least had not realized he did, but he drank and bathed the dust from himself. The well was deep and the water tasted of rock washed clean underground. After, he sat back in the shade and wrapped his arms about his legs. He did not know what to do save to go on, and on beyond that.

 _I have never felt this alone._

 _Not alone._ The words climbed his spine like a caress. _Never again._

His rebuttal was instinctive and brought him to his feet. Beyond this nook of shade, the desert yelled white at him.

 _Why didst thou send me here?_ He cried into the ether, to Vanimórë, to Glorfindel, to Fëanor. _What didst thou want of me? That I should become what I was?_

And in Sudu Cull, through the clamor left by his escape, Vanimórë heard him.

***

Power cracked through Vanimórë’s mind; a sunburst of rage and fear. He heard shouts amid the twang of bows and the distinctive clink of arrowheads striking stone.

“Lugmokí!”

She stood and pulled on a thin gown. Together they ran out into the court and looked up. There was no smell of fire and there were no screams of agony, only the urgent calls of the guards, the fire-burn in his mind, and, then above, a flame whipping up a tower and casting a ruby glaze upon the stone.

“Bloody Hells,” he murmured. “It is afraid.” He turned to Lugmokí. “What didst thou feel? Before I came in?”

“I...um.” She grew flustered. “It was...Nymashúzet...her dreams. I’m not sure detail beyond that matters.” She went to a rosebush and plucked a charred bud. “How does a balrog come into the desert? That this one woke Nymashúzet is obvious, and she will go where this one goes.” She smelled the petals. “And so Néma’s people are out of danger.” She looked at him. “For the time being.”

“Yes.” He traced a finger up the inside of her arm. “I smelled her on thee. _In_ thee.” He rubbed his fingers together.” Then this one flees from her.” He glanced up at the faint cries chasing one another across the city. “This -- me, Nymashúzet, this balrog. It is like a broken mirror. I can only see pieces, and I need to see the whole. What does Sauron say?”

Lugmokí tossed the ruined flower onto the flagstones. “He told me to stay out of her memories.”

“Good advice,” murmured Vanimórë. “But does he not mean to do anything?”

“I don’t know. Call me home, I imagine.”

“Few are those whom a balrog will serve, or ally with. This is a world of order, Lugmokí. So was mine. A balrog…” He took a breath. “I must follow it. Some-one has to. And Nymashúzet…”

She looked at him. “Maybe the Lord of Mordor will call you as well.”

“I would ask questions of Melkor himself if I thought he could answer them,” he said. “The thought of walking into Mordor is like swallowing a stone. And yet…” He walked to the fountain, dipped his hands in. “What would this Sauron want of me?”

“Counsel,” she said.

He knew he would have to go and that if Sauron did not call him, he would go anyway. But…

There came a rap at the door. A pair of the queen’s handmaids held a summons for Lugmokí. She brushed her hair and pulled a caftan on over her thin robe and left with them. Vanimórë waited while she spoke with the queen and counselors. He pushed out his mind and felt the discord everywhere around him. He thought again of mirrors, many mirrors, trying to fit a shattered piece of one into another. He was one piece. He did not belong. This balrog, full of fear, was another. The night aged, drew forth the moon, died in a fading of stars. Morning opened its golden eye. He was not expecting it when it came, a cry like a blow across the face.

 _Why didst thou send me here?_

 _What?_ Vanimórë came to his feet. He looked around. _Whom art thou?_

The name was given him like a terrible reproach: _Coldagnir._

Lugmokí’s voice coiled around the back of his mind. _It gives you its name? Do you play at intrigues with me, so-called Son of Sauron?_

Vanimórë whirled. The voice was so close the speaker might have been standing at his shoulder, but it was closer yet. It was familiar, and yet alien, something he always dreaded and yet now it was almost welcomed. He looked across the court, saw Lugmokí step out into the light, a woman of black and white. Their eyes met.

“We always played, Sauron. At least, shall we say, I was permitted to play. But thou art not my father. Yes. The balrog gave me its name. And I know not why, and thou knowest that. I could never hide anything from him, and I do not think I could from thee.” _I do not understand!_

Lugmokí moved closer, and it was with a subtle change in her gait; though she had always been graceful to his eyes, this grace came from outside and beyond the trappings of her flesh. She tilted her head. “It is so.” Her voice deepened, acquired a teasing lilt. “What are you? What are you _really?_ ”

Vanimórë’s eyes narrowed. He did not move when her perfume, sweet and smoky, drifted around him and tantalized him with thoughts of bed, or simply, ravenously, mating as wild animals did. He said, picking his way over those broken bits of mirror that reflected different worlds: “I have always been myself. Only that. Now who is the intriguer?”

A male voice spoke up inside Vanimórë’s head. Lugmokí’s lips shaped each word as they appeared. Her eyes gleamed dark in the shadows. _Are you more comfortable this way, then? Does it put you at your ease?_

“Nothing about you could put me at my ease.” He circled her. “I am used to him in my mind, and truly I prefer Lugmokí’s voice and mind.”

She turned to keep her eyes on his face. He sketched a mocking little bow. It offended him in some way he did not understand to see her used, not as he had been used, but truly as the Mouth of Sauron. He reached out, through revulsion and attraction both, and touched her cheek to see if it provoked a reaction. She held him with her eyes.

“Thou knowest of these Doors, Sauron,” he said. “Therefore I will speak to thee, for thou hast knowledge I need. But this is not solely about me, is it? There was a balrog here who called out to me, using an Elvish name. Nymashúzet has woken in Moria and will seek him out. He is gone into the desert and I will follow him, because there is too much here that is strange, even to me, a stranger. And these people upon the Haradwaith are thine allies.”

He slipped his hands into Lugmokí’s hair, bent his head close to hers and stared into her eyes, wondering if she felt his touch or if she slept behind her master’s gaze. He lowered his voice. “Art thou quite comfortable with the idea of two balrogs awake after so long without any leash on them?”

“Bold.” She stepped closer, speaking in two voices at once. A strange smile curved her lips. “She craves that in you the way she craves it in herself.”

“But that is what we are, Sauron,” Vanimórë murmured. “She and I. The same creation, of different worlds.”

Her hand came to rest on his chest. She looked up beneath her lashes. “Are you going to kiss me, then, Son of Sauron?”

Vanimórë looked down into eyes that were like Lugmokí’s, yet not, and he thought of Mordor and an arched window casting its shape over a bed, Sauron’s voice in his memory like an echo: Kiss me. “No,” he said, and let Lugmokí’s hair spill through his fingers, let his hands glide down her back, taking pleasure in the slight arch of her spine. His hands rested on her waist, then jerked her into him, bringing his hardness against her. “I will kiss _her_.”

She put her other hand on him and he felt her voice in his head: _Yes. Please. Kiss me._

He moved in to do it and hesitated. Her breath wavered into something soft and ragged.

“Art thou alone?”

“Yes.”

Good. She moved a hand up the back of his neck. He did not want this to be Sauron, for Sauron to feel it, take pleasure in it. _Is she truly? And dost thou not want him, want her, and both for revenge?_ Was he asking himself this? The voice was ironic and incisive and very far away from the burgeoning lust in his groin. _It is just sex._

 _Self-deceit does not suit thee. After fighting something for so long, what man would not feel shame in surrender? But in this world, it is different, is it not? Whom dost thou truly want, Vanimórë? Him? Or her? Or yourself reflected in her?_

Something in him twisted away from those thoughts.

 _No_.

“I want thee.” His voice came out of some deep, hungry place. “Lugmokí…”

She lifted her chin and grazed his mouth with hers, cupping her hand around his cock through his tight-fitting leathers. He hauled up her skirts and slipped his fingers into the wet trough of her cunt. Her brow creased, her mouth opened, and she started to pant. She unlaced his trousers. He played with her clit until she arched her back and moaned, and then he shoved his fingers in her up to the knuckles. Her hips thrust up into his hand. She nuzzled his jaw as she freed his cock, catching its stony shaft. Heat pulsed into her fingertips. She pumped it in a slow hard fist.

“Kiss me,” she gasped.

He lifted her up and put her against the wall and pressed her into it with his body, bringing her down on his cock. Her shoulders leaned into the stone as her legs wrapped tight around his waist. He gripped her buttocks and started to thrust, slow but hard, forcing silky puffs of breath from her arched throat. He pushed into her faster, panting into her neck, and closed his teeth on sinew sheathed in musky skin, and sucked the taste into his mouth. Her inner walls tightened around him and she cried out. She grabbed overhead onto a thick vine for leverage.

 _Whom art thou inside, Vanimórë? Sauron? Lugmokí? Thyself?_

Something broke in him, like those mirror-shards, falling into chaos. She clamped about him, drew on him, hardened him into such an exquisite agony that he was helpless not to drive into her. Her thighs slipped in his sweat. She held onto his neck as he went harder and harder, shaping sweet grunts out of her sharp breath. She writhed between him and the stone. He was suspended in torment; his being rushed down with his blood into his cock.

“Come for me,” he breathed into her wet darkness.

“More, still,” she panted. “More…yes!”

He rocked against the swell of her clit, holding himself in the sweat-bleeding moment before release. Her muscles tightened, her breath locked before exploding hot and raw. She grit her teeth. Her womb contracted and she went soft, pulling in deep breaths that timed themselves to the long hard spasms of her cunt. He groaned perhaps, or cried out---he did not know, the spill of himself into her whitened his mind, burning him from his groin outward. She clenched around him and groaned and he throbbed again, again, again, pulling back into himself, melting out of her hot oblivion.

Under the cloud of satiation he eased from her and cupped his hand under her, cradling her sex, furnace-hot against his palm. He was drained, but at the bottom of the empty cup, the hunger smiled and stretched and began to purr, anticipating, challenging his ego. Was this what happened when his bonds were broken? He stroked her there, and there, with slick fingers. How far could she go, how much did she need? As much as he? He stared into her eyes as his hand moved.

 _I am...hungry...too hungry..._

Her hands made bands of iron around his upper arms. She growled and contorted, nails piercing his skin. His fingers filled her swollen flesh, the heel of his hand rubbing the hot stone of her clit. It didn’t take long; she let out a yearning roar, the back of her head digging into the wall, and pushed her hips up into his palm. Her body pulsed to the beat of her heart. She fell into a stew of Black Speech words, syllables softened and smeared into moans. Her hips snapped once, twice, three times. He smelled her sweat, strong and clean, pouring into the traces of Melkor and Nymashúzet still left behind; the memories gathered into beads and floated away on the tides of her skin. Muscles still twitching, breath still panting, she pulled him down into a kiss. He joined it in a breathless fury, before he broke it, suddenly, but his hands still in her hair, on her back.

“I am ravenous,” he admitted, his voice still touched with dark velvet. “I am free here. I do not know true freedom. This world…”

Lugmokí’s fingertips brushed his mouth.

“That was for _thee_. Not him.” He leaned his brow against hers. “I think I may be going mad.”

“No, not mad.” She caressed his neck and kissed his cheek. “Hungry.”

He laughed, full of bewilderment and pleasure that still surged in his blood and eddied like a tide, pulling back, waiting to come in again.

“Hungry,” he agreed with a flashing smile, and then because he had to say it, “I did not take thee out of some kind of need for revenge against Sauron.”

“I know.”

Was that true? There was no way he could hurt the Sauron he knew, his father. But in this reality, where Sauron had made Lugmokí, who was himself in another form, he could strike at Sauron by taking her, like this. He did not want that to be his motivation, and he did not believe it was, but he had to examine the possibility.

“No,” he decided finally, aloud, tracing one of her winging brows with a fingertip. _Who am I touching? her, me? Him?_ “That is not what I am doing. Thou art thyself and worth more than that. I do not know...I just...do not know. I have to think. And it is hard. What dost thou see in me? Him?”

“I see him, but I see you.” She grinned. “I see you very well.”

His smile blazed again, sensual, wicked and wry. He put out a hand, like a lord escorting a lady.

“Shall we bathe?”

***

There were too many questions. Vanimórë, methodically tying his wet hair back into a long horsetail, considered them, tried to examine them from a distance. The most urgent, the most unanswerable, were the Doors.

Sauron, it seemed, knew the most about them, and whatever Vanimórë’s feelings, he would go to Mordor, sooner or later. He would confront Sauron face-to-face, not through mind-speech or Lugmokí. The possession had rocked the already unsteady ground under his feet and he tried to fathom his response to it, to Sauron. To Lugmokí. The simplest one, and the one which held a great deal of the answer – though not all – was that he was starved for pleasure and in this world, and with this woman, had been able to sate it.

 _Not yet_ , he thought, looking out into the court, now filled with the sun. _I will not think about that yet._

The balrogs, then. In his world, Sauron had long known that Nymashúzet slumbered under Caradhras. She had woken once before, not long before Vanimórë found Nimrodel in the White Mountains, and then curled back into hibernation. Sauron had never called her to Mordor.

 _She is more useful where she is_ , he had said.

Useful, and impossibly dangerous. Balrogs were fire-demons from before Time; only one of greater power and will could control them, as Melkor had, using them as weapons. Vanimórë had been born the year after the Dagor Bragollach and so had not seen it, or the destruction wrought by the balrogs, but he had known them in Angband, and even quiescent, they were things of terror.

Nymashúzet had not called out to him, she was interested in her kin.

He strolled into the court, picking up the charred rosebud Lugmokí had thrown aside. The dead petals still screamed with the wash of heat. Folding his arms, he placed a mental finger upon the imprint the balrog had left in his mind, and flung out his own question:

 _Whom art thou?_

For heartbeats there was no answer. A small, bright bird swooped down to the fountain and away again. The rising pulse of the city hummed beyond the walls.

An answer came, furnace-blast but with fear deep within it: _Why didst thou send me here?_

 _I did not send thee here, Balrog._

He felt a despairing laugh, strangely human in its communication of bewildered hurt. _Glorfindel permitted me to live. Fëanor and Fingon spared my life. And thou didst say to me, “One I love wept for thee. If thou art worth his tears, thou art worth forgiveness.” Thou doth lie better than Gothmog or Melkor ever did, son of Sauron. Why didst thou not take my life? Why send me to this place?_

 _What in the Hells art thou talking about?_ Vanimórë demanded. _Glorfindel? Fingon? Fëanor?_

 _Glorfindel gave me back my name, but I said I would be Coldagnir, until I had made requital for my acts._

This was like wrestling with an eel. Vanimórë paced the court.

 _I do not know a Coldagnir. For that matter, since when does a balrog use an Elvish name?_

 _I was Nemrúshkeraz._

Vanimórë stopped walking.

 _Nemrúshkeraz._

 _Yes._

 _I remember._

 _I would have sent thee to the Void, were it in my power. Not to the Harad_ , spat Vanimórë.

 _Then didst thou lie to me and say I was worthy of forgiveness?_ Nemrúshkeraz blazed back. _Son of Cruelty thou art indeed!_

Vanimórë stopped walking. _I have not seen thee since before I left Angband in the First Age. Where didst thou come from? Who woke thee?_

 _This is a game, then?_

 _Let us pretend that it is. Tell me what happened, from the beginning, when thou wert woken._

Nemrúshkeraz’s words came clipped and strained, and Vanimórë frowned at the emotion which filled and overflowed them: he felt betrayed. How curious. Vanimórë had never considered that the balrogs had any feelings he could identify with or even comprehend.

 _One of the Valar woke me_ , continued Nemrúshkeraz. _I do not know which one._

 _And where wert thou? Where didst thou sleep?_

 _It was far to the east of Angband, to the mountains the Elves called the Orocarni. When I woke, I knew that one came to challenge me, to do battle._

 _Who?_

 _The one called Glorfindel, who died in Gondolin. I saw him there. I knew him._

While Vanimórë did not doubt Glorfindel would meet a Balrog in battle, he doubted the Elf-lord would travel so far to accomplish it. _Glorfindel? He journeyed thousands of leagues into the East of the world to fight a Balrog?_

 _Of course, thou knowest nothing of this._

 _Not a damned thing._

There was a momentary hesitation. _He came in power. As a God. He came with the Noldor, those whom had long died or gone West to Aman, to the place they called New Cuiviénen. Fëanor was there, and Fingon, and Ecthelion, who slew Gothmog. I saw that...I witnessed it..._

Now it was Vanimórë who did not reply.

 _And I saw thee_ , the Balrog went on, inexorable in his pain and anger. _Free of Sauron, and like Glorfindel, made a Power. There was a new balance, Glorfindel told me. The Valar were diminished, Sauron had been destroyed –_

Vanimórë’s fists clenched. _That is enough!_

 _– the dead who were sent into the Void were reborn and Glorfindel and thee –_

“Be silent,” he snarled aloud. He had come to the fountain and pressed his hands to the stone lip. _Thou wert dreaming in thy long sleep._

 _It was no dream, son of Sauron! I was permitted to return with the Noldor to their encampment, to learn what I could be now that I am free of servitude. And they did not want me wandering alone in the world. It was winter. Snow. We camped one night, and then thou didst come to me, from far away and spoke to me. I was walking back to the camp and then I was here..._

Vanimórë laughed. He did not know what else to do. Sauron destroyed, himself free, a Power? Glorfindel a Power, the Noldor returned? And…Fëanor? A hard smile lingered on his mouth.

 _A dream, Balrog._

 _No._

 _Sauron is not destroyed._

Vanimórë drew in a breath. Sauron was not destroyed in this world, or the one he had come from. But, perhaps in some vision of the world, through some Doorway, he was.

A man could go mad trying to think of these things.

Yes, and perhaps in some world I have been made into a Power, he thought with heavy irony. I would quite like to go to that world. Which means, if what he says is true, that he is from another world, another version of Arda, even as I am.

 _I came here_ , he said to Nemrúshkeraz. _Through what is named a Door, or a Dreaming Door. This is not the world I have always known. It is Arda, the lands are the same, but Sauron in this world is not my father. Dost thou understand? I was led to an arch of rock in the desert. It was powerful. And like thee, I have known Power, but I did not recognize it. I must have walked under it, through it...it was a night in the Harad before and after. Only when I entered the Caravansary did I realize it was not the one I left. Sauron, in this world, believes Melkor made these doors. His...the Lady Lugmokí, she told me that they are not constant, never remain in one place, but if one passes through them, they will emerge somewhere else, into a different version of their world._

There was a very long silence this time. He felt the balrog’s doubt.

 _I saw no door_ , he said.

 _Thou didst see nothing, feel nothing?_

 _No. I was walking through trees. I could see the encampment's fires through them. Snow fell from a branch and stung in my eyes and then it was here, and there was sand in my mouth._

 _Nevertheless._

 _So, thou art saying this is not where I came from? But Nymashúzet..._

 _Was she there? The Arda thou didst come from?_

 _I did not feel her. But I know her. This is the same Nymashúzet._

 _And that is why thou didst flee._

 _Yes. I want to be free. I do not want to be what I was. Yet to escape the city I had to become fire...and they promised me, Glorfindel and Fëanor, that I could find myself, my true self. Doorways? So it was not thee who sent me here, to punish me?_

 _No. Neither am I a Power. At least_ , he added wryly, _this present vision of me is not. Thou didst truly see Fëanor?_

 _Yes_. And there was such a confused, blushing human taste to his reply that Vanimórë almost smiled and asked, _what was he like?_

 _Nemrúshkeraz said something in Valarin, a tongue Vanimórë scarcely knew, but the meaning was clear enough._

 _And Nymashúzet?_

 _It is impossible to explain. We are...once we were part of the same thought, the same power, before we each became ourselves, individual._

 _Like a twin?_

 _It goes deeper than that. Twins can be very alike, I think? We are not, and yet..._

 _Opposite sides of a coin?_ Vanimórë suggested.

 _Yes. In a sense. But...she glories in what she is. I wanted…I was the fire of the hearth, of comfort and warmth. Nymashúzet is the lightning-strike and the blaze that sets forests afire._

 _I agree._

 _I do not understand any of this. I know where I was, what I saw. They told me many things. There was a great gap in my knowledge, but, I talked with thee. Thou art the same son of Sauron, not a different...copy, like a sword made a little different to another. How is it that thou art not a Power here? For I know thou art!_

 _My father is alive, and why in the Hells name would I be a Power? It is impossible._

 _No. It is not._

Vanimórë strode back into the shaded chamber and poured wine.

 _Whether it is or not, Balrog, I am not a Power. Not here, not in the world I came from. If I were, I would not be a slave._ He drank off the wine. _Who wept for thee?_

 _Thou didst not give me a name. But Glorfindel told me of him._

 _Who? ___

 _But Vanimórë knew._

 _ _His name is Elgalad_ , said Nemrúshkeraz._

Vanimórë threw the cup out of the chamber where it bounced on the stone flags, shedding the lees.

 _Thou_. The word was tight. _I want to speak with thee. This is madness._

 _I cannot stay._

 _Nymashúzet will find thee wherever thou art, even if it took hundreds of years. Thou canst not run forever, Balrog, and I want neither of thee loose on the earth causing chaos!_

Nemrúshkeraz cried out: _I will never learn what I am if she finds me!_

 _I intend to learn more about these Doors_ , Vanimórë stated, his mind-voice like metal. _Neither of us are in our own worlds. It would best if thou wert with me. Us. I think we can find thee before Nymashúzet does. perhaps_ , he amended to himself. _Where art thou?_

 _South. If I could return to where I came from, perhaps..._

 _I do not know if we can_ , Vanimórë admitted. _But what thou hast said interests me exceedingly. There are too many pieces. Let us try and fit at least a few together._

____

__


	8. Light

 

Jeremy thought about a breeze, prayed for one, sitting by the open window and looking out on all of God’s darkness. It came down hard out here, but there were stars. Lots and lots of stars. He smoked his cigarette down to the filter.

 _I remember a night like this one not so long ago really when we were out on the roof and Jasmine was sick so we brought her in our bed and came out here. It was nice in a way when Jazzie got sick but not so sick she needed to go to the ER because that’s the only time Shannon didn’t sleep so well so in the hot darkness with the kid sleeping I had her to himself. For a little while._

“God don’t give a shit about me,” he said. “Just gonna let me fry up here.”

The darkness was thick with crickets, millions of them, their shrilling calls stirring the air and filling it up. A weak puff of humid air moved against his cheek. He chuckled. He ground out the filter on the windowsill and listened to the wind move through the green cornstalks and smelled a week’s worth of rain buried in its breath.

 _Maybe she would’ve stayed for awhile and put up with the night-terrors. Not the war-dreams but the other ones. That night I told her about them, while Jazzie slept with her chin in a plastic bowl to catch any sudden bursts of puke and we sat out here and drank ice cold beer and made a game out of the stars. About the burned-down church and how when it got real bad I’d drive out there in my dad’s old pickup and look at the sooty arches. Go out there and get right with God._

“Honey,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb across his bottom lip. “I’ve been dreaming about those doors since I was a kid.”

A silent strobe-flash lit up the sky. It turned night to day in a split-second and made stark shadows of everything. He scrambled out through the window and stood on the roof, turning around to scan the sky. A huge fireball plowed its way through the high air, dreamy and slow, shedding long ribbons of cinders as it fell. It struck a new level in the atmosphere and flashed again, impossible silver-white brilliance that filled the heavens and the earth and should’ve blinded him but didn’t. He watched it pass over the house, heading straight for the north forty, bits and pieces flashing as they fell and hit trees, hanks of grass, the chimney. He went back into the house and ran down the flights of stairs to the road, wearing boxer shorts and a pair of sport sandals. The thing hit with the force of an earthquake.

“Jesus fuckin Christ.” He got into the truck and cranked the ignition. “Jesus holy Lord, come on, start up you fucker, don’t give me this shit!”

The engine caught and he was off, bouncing to and fro over the rutted road, following the glow of flames. In the distance there were sirens, but he wasn’t thinking about them. He wasn’t thinking about his fields either, this slice of good earth left to him on his father’s passing; the color of the light reminded him of Iraq and he struggled not to think about that but going on in his mind, wrestling for dominance, burning humvees and the bonfire parties of his teenhood, and out of nowhere he thought of the burned-out arches at the church, the color of the stone, and his foot pressed down on the gas making the truck buck wilder than ever, displeased to be used on a road like this, thinking IED fire and bonfire and church fire, holy fire, the light of a long summer’s day falling through those ruined arches and making shapes on the ground that climbed a ladder into his dreams.

 _Burned up a third of the crop, too. Easy. Dammit._

The meteor had carved a long deep blackened rut through the corn. Some of the leaves had caught fire but most of them wouldn’t hold more than a sullen smolder. Something in the crater had kindled, though, and it burned beyond the range of his sight with a bright and peculiar light. He got out of the truck and walked on the burnt ground, feeling the heat of the fireball’s passing rise up into the bottoms of his feet. He smelled scorched stone and ozone and the rich bitter smoke of green things that yearned to burst into flames but the moisture in their skins held them back. The sirens drew closer. He came to the crater where the heat was intense. He broke into a thick sweat. A strange new scent rose out of the blackened dirt, something that he could not name but was familiar. His mind free-associated: his mother’s lilacs sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen, the breath of the first girl he ever kissed, dew evaporating off a field of wildflowers and rising into mist, and something else, something aggressive like summer sunlight bent through a curtain of distant rain or lightning waiting in a belly of cloud and waiting for a chance to strike. He walked to the edge. He looked down.

For a moment his mind blanked. There was calm inside him stretching from childhood to old age. He tried to make sense of what he was seeing but he could not. He stared.

In the bottom of the crater was a small round crystal.

The crater itself was big enough to park a tractor in. It formed an ellipsis trailing back from the ridge of earth he stood upon. He squatted.

At first he thought it was reflecting the light of scattered flames, whatever it was, that that was why it sparkled so, but none of the surrounding flames were white and the light that welled up from its wealth of facets was both white and silver and gave forth no spectrum of anything but starlight, and moonlight, and the faces of heavenly bodies reflected upon a pool of still water. The light dimmed, and then it brightened as though warmed by his presence. He felt a strong urge to touch it. This urge was primal, like hunger or thirst, but it had the soaring grace of an emotion, the power of those waves that come out of nowhere and move through the body, knocking things over, sweeping fragmentary thoughts aside, making way for something instinctive. It was like seeing Jasmine’s face for the first time, his baby girl, come squalling and full of angry life into the world; it was like touching the sweet curve of her mother’s breast, kissing her petal mouth and making her feel good; it was like doing the right thing and making his father happy. It was more like hunger than those things, too, more like some kind of soul-thirst, an emptiness that longs to be filled.

Jeremy climbed down into the crater. Something tumbled across his instep and burned the skin but he didn’t notice. He touched the thing and another one of those soundless flashes swelled up, stealing the breath of the night. He could still see. He picked it up.

“Wow, you’re cool.” He grinned. “Cool to the touch. You don’t even burn. Imagine that.”

The flat side of the stone rested in his palm. The light gathered into itself and burned way down, twinkling in a way that made him think of whispering voices. He held it up to his eye level. Up close, reflected green on the insides of its facets, he glimpsed the memory of trees. He touched the domed surface with a fingertip. It flared full of soft light like a firefly. He closed his fingers over it and the light turned red as it passed through his flesh and bone. He opened his hand. It sparkled like a diamond in firelight.

“You’re very beautiful,” he murmured. “You know that, though, don’ t you?”

He heard the sirens stop moving and listened to his neighbors bellow his name.

***

“Dost thou believe it?” Vanimórë watched Lugmokí as she veiled her hair. “The balrog’s tale?”

“The Doors may come from any world to any world.” Lugmokí adjusted the band and pinned the dust muffle into place. She used the tip of her pinky to apply kohl. “Perhaps in one of them you are a Power. In others, like this one, you may never have been born. In some of them perhaps you are like the Sauron you loathe.” She glanced at him. “Nemrúshkeraz believes what he says?”

“I do not believe he is lying. I did think he had dreamed it. He slumbered for a very long time.”

Lugmokí came to him and put a hand on his chest. “It will not help you, but you know that. You would speak to Nemrúshkeraz because he knows a Vanimórë that is free and powerful, but you, this you.” He watched the shape of her mouth move beneath the thin embroidered fabric. “This you is not free.” Her fingers tapped him. “Here you are not a Power. It will not ease you to know that in some other Arda you are quite the opposite.”

“Do not,” he smiled.

“Don’t what?”

“Distract me.”

Her smile turned sly. “Are you so easy to distract?”

“I seem to be.”

She laughed.

Vanimórë fastened his own dust muffle into place. “Since I cannot and will not imagine myself ever being truly free---”

“But are you not free here?”

“I wonder,” he mused. “Somehow I do not think it is that easy. Nemrúshkeraz tells me a tale that might be of some other person, and in fact, is. But yes, I do wish to see him, and I think he will wait for us. He is adrift also.”

“And he fears Nymashúzet.”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He does not need a reason to fear her,” Vanimórë said, very dry. “But yes, in a way. They are, for want of a better word, twins.”

“And not identical ones.” She fell silent, and the expression on her face turned distant. “Very well.” Her eyes flashed back into the moment. “Do you know where he is?”

***

The phones had started ringing soon as he sent the fire trucks away and had continued at an obscene hour of the morning. Someone at the newspaper wanted to ask him questions and he did the best he could to answer them over a cup of strong coffee.  


When work was done for the day people had converged upon his property. Kids dared each other to run up to the edge and pick burned corn leaves while their parents stood around in stifling late afternoon heat and drank the Kool-aid they had brought with them in giant coolers, listening to the cicadas wind up in the hot branches of trees, chattering amongst themselves about superhero spaceships and extraterrestrial viruses and secret government experiments. They swapped stories of the fireball, how it had crashed with a sound like Armageddon and how before that it had burned a bright path across the sky, lighting up restless bedrooms all over the county. One teenage girl had grainy video of it on her cell phone, and she passed it around, playing it over and over to the bottomless delight of the handful of folks who had managed to sleep through the whole thing.

The local newspaper sent a guy, not much more than a kid himself, really, to come out and snap pictures. He wanted a picture of Jeremy beside the crater, and with a tired smile he passed his plastic cup to a willing hand and obliged. The kids wanted photos of themselves with the devastation, and the photographer, who was a father himself, took a pile of them: kids holding burned cornstalks, kids crowded in beside their parents, kids standing bravely on the long aisle of burned ground. Jeremy watched it all and stood beside his truck, which was parked as close to the crater as he could get and still stay on the weedy road. Fred Stanwyck, his closest neighbor, offered to wheel over his grill and cook up some burgers and hotdogs, and other parents chimed in with offers of coleslaw and potato salad and steaks and fresh tomatoes, and though Jeremy hadn’t slept well and was exhausted, he figured why the hell not? It was a nice thing, it made him look neighborly, and he was all alone out here with nothing better to do anyway.

As dusk fell and the air filled with charcoal smoke and fireflies, Jeremy sat on the screened-in porch and watched the mothers shepherding their kids toward a long table. His cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“You know you’re on YouTube, right? What the hell is going on out there?”

“Yeah, we had a little somethin somethin, all right,” he said. “How are you?”

“Answer the damn question already!”

“Yes, Janet, there was a fireball over my house.“ He chuckled. “My house is still standing, and I am still standing, and my truck is still standing. So are all my cats. Can’t say the same for my corn, though. Ouch.”

“Was it like a meteorite or something?”

Jeremy said nothing. In the background a little girl shrieked laughter. “Nope. Just a fireball. They think it was a tiny bit of comet or something. It burned up right before it hit my corn.”

“How is the corn? Are you gonna be all right with that? Do you need money?”

“What money? All that money you're makin cracking the books?”

“I’d ask Mom.”

“Mom, who is on a pension. Hell no.”

“On a pension and working part time and making more money than you and me put together. We could swing you a mortgage payment or two if you needed it.”

“I’ll be okay. I’m gonna have to do more of the work myself, but I’ll manage.”

“Hey, it’s summer, I’m out of school, I could come out there and…”

“No!”

She sighed. “So what are you doing right now? I hear noise.”

“Oh, the neighbors are putting on a little…I don’t know, I guess maybe it’s a fireball barbeque. Everyone came out to look at the crater, and there was this guy here from the paper takin pictures, and Fred offered to haul his grill over here and cook up for everyone, and so…here it is. Instant barbeque, just add backyard.”

“How are Shannon and Jazzie?”

“All right. Haven’t seen em in awhile, but all right last I heard. Shannon’s moved in with her mama down in Arizona.” He scraped at a warped place in the porch boards with his heel. “I’m supposed to have Jazzie for a couple of weeks next month, though.”

“She must be getting big.”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “Five years old now. She’s starting school this fall.”

“That’s awesome.”

“It is.”

“Do you need me to let you go? I just wanted to make sure you didn’t burn down or anything. Mom will be calling you soon if she hasn’t already, so heads up. I don’t want to pull you away from your guests or anything.”

“Nah, it’s okay. Listen…Janet.” He slipped into the kitchen and closed the screen. “I had this really weird dream about you this morning.”

“Oh really? Is this like the time you had that dream about me trying to fuck Ozzy Osborne in the changing room at JC Penney except the salesgirl or whatever kept throwing water balloons at my ankles? Because I can top you one better than that. Okay, I had this dream that Lady Gaga kept---”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m serious.”

“Well, so am I,” she said.

He went to the window and looked toward the mailbox. “I had this dream about Hobbitland.”

***

In the rising heat of the early morning, Lugmokí’s escort made ready for departure. They were six, four maulobí plus themselves, pulling one wagon covered and loaded down with enough provisions to make the full journey to Sud Sicanna. Lugmokí refused the Queen’s offer of camels, but accepted her offers of palm honey and palm wine, dates, a pair of tents, and smoked meat.

Vanimórë did not know what was said to the queen, but it was clear from his sense of Néma’s mind that she was glad enough at the balrog’s departure and willing leave matters in the hands of Sauron’s proxy. Following a brief and hurried council, the exchange of gifts, and a formal embrace, the two women parted ways. The six of them departed in the company of caravans through the palace gates.

Despite the earliness of the hour, the trade road bustled with traffic. Herds of camels came toward the city, herded by blue-robed men on fined-boned horses. There was much noise within the trade caravans: cages of shrieking birds, the restless baa of goats, the boisterous voices of men still drunk from the night before and lamenting the sun’s brightness.

As they moved away from the city walls, the deep desert opened around them in a panorama of dust and shimmering heat.

“I must ask you something,” said Lugmokí. “This morning…did you feel as though something has changed? Something in the world?”

Vanimórë stared into the plume of dust kicked up by the caravan ahead. “I am not sure of thy meaning,” he said after a moment. “I have felt a strangeness ever since coming here. It all feels like a broken mirror.” He looked aside at her. “Why? What dost thou feel?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s as though…I look at the sky and it looks different. The way it feels has changed, like it’s a constructed thing and now I see it as such. I know that it is a made thing like the rest of the multiverse, but nonetheless it seems like something has shifted. The way the energies flow through all things.” She looked at him. “It’s come loose.”

“Loose,” he repeated. “Yes, that is a good a word as any. Has Sauron spoken to thee? Does he know what may have caused it?”

“He knows,” she said. “He is trying to quantify it and hoping that quantification will lead to answers.”

“I do not know if these Doors often cast people from one world to another. Perhaps some pass through them and die and simply vanish, but it does seem strange that so closely together I should come, and then a balrog, both to the Harad.”

She watched the pale horizon sway with the motion of her horse. “The Doors…they exist in the spaces between worlds, and they are drawn to the places where two parallels are wont to make a natural bridge between themselves. This desire between parallels has always been so in the multiverse created by Ilúvatar, but it has been so more often in this last age, and whomever built the Doors likely did not reckon on such an increase in parallel to parallel activity. It is possible that due to such an increase the Doors are degrading. I don’t know. _He_ doesn’t know.”

Vanimórë frowned. “So there are more...crossings? Worlds spilling into worlds?”

She inclined her head. “It is so.”

“I hoped Sauron _would_ know. If he does not, then he can only guess what might happen, and why. Why?” The horses moved past the long rows of camels. He blinked, thinking of this journey made in another world, and he felt for an instant as if he hung over an abyss. He took a breath of hot air. “What would happen,” he wondered, “if all these...realities collided into one?”

Lugmokí said nothing. Far ahead the desert heaved itself into hills of riven rock, where, he knew, dry gullies gaped from the broken land of dead-end gorges and tiny, hidden waterholes.

“I came here, a long time ago,” he said. “In my world, Sauron was defeated at the Last Alliance. The One Ring was cut from his hand. He was not killed, of course, and he took a long time to embody himself again. So I came to Sud Sicanna, and ruled it, for a thousand years. Before the Elves woke, this was a green, beautiful land, where the Mother dwelled. Knowest thou of her? She is not Vala. She is more. She led me to the Door. She fought with Melkor here and the desert formed, after. It is a place of ancient power and the echoes of it, so it does not surprise me, perhaps, that I came here…the balrog…perhaps it was just an accident, but thou wouldst say that the universe, and yes, I know there is more than Arda, has become unstable. It makes me think of the legends of the Last Battle…”

“In Mordor, among Orcish folk, the earth is always _she_.” Lugmokí smiled. “They revere their desert lands as a goddess, and speak much of the early days when She woke to life and sang her dreams into existence across the barren plains.”

He nodded. “I never thought about Her among the Orcs, but she went among all people. I have tried to speak to her here. I feel her, but I feel her everywhere; she is as the Earth itself. She is not speaking to me, though. I saw her outside the caravansary south of Maresh, and there we spoke. We walked into the dry land and there was a Door. It looked like something left from an ancient ruin, but the _power_...I did not know it. I knew Melkor and it did not feel like him. Dana was gone, after, so perhaps she did show me a way to freedom. It just seems too…simple. She could have done it a long time ago, but then she is unknowable, at least to a man.” He smiled under his veil and gestured to their right, into that barren land. “He is in there, somewhere. Nemrúshkeraz. I can feel him. We will have to leave the road.”

“Aye, it is as I feared. Nevertheless what must be done must be done.” Lugmokí gave orders to the maulobí and they veered off the road and onto the hardpan. The wheels of the wagon shimmied and bounced along the ground. “May the firmament hold out and not turn to dunes before we find him.”

Vanimórë looked into the landscape. _Where art thou?_ He felt that it had not, despite its fear, moved on. _We have to leave the trade road. How far didst thou run from Sudu Cull?_

The answer came to him with unexpected eagerness. Vanimórë thought of its fear and wondered at its loneliness, finding it strange that the creature would have such emotions. _I could still see the city far away. The land rose, very dry, to broken cliffs. I walked from sunrise to noon and came to a place under the cliffs. There is water here._

 _Stay there_ , Vanimórë ordered. He looked at Lugmokí. “It could see the city at sunrise, and then walked from the road for about six hours, I judge. There are cliffs and a well under them. We might reach it by dusk.”

“Very well,” she said.

***

Jeremy hid the space crystal in a candle lantern made out of colored glass. When it slept, and though he knew that a crystal, even one from space, couldn’t be alive, he nonetheless thought of it just that way---asleep and dreaming; when it slept the glow was low, much like a flame turned down to its lowest edge. He put the candle holder in the upstairs corridor window because it faced the fields, and at night when he came in the candleholder would blaze bright, a carnival-colored star, like it was happy to see him home.  


He would take his supper upstairs and sit on the carpet, his eyes on the light, and more often than not his cats would be up there too, tussling over who had the right to curl up underneath the sill. He watched the glow of it wax and wane as he chewed. It calmed him, smoothing out his thoughts until they felt like cool silk spread on the floor of his mind. In his moments near its glow, he stretched out on top of those layers of silk and enjoyed the feelings of happy memories: building a snow tunnel with Janet in the front yard beneath a bright silver moon, coming up with names for their first Persian kitten, the Christmas he’d gotten the full set of Narnia books and how their mother read it aloud to them every night before bed for what seemed like an age. He remembered the taste of banana milkshakes bought at the shop down the road in the hot summer sun and the thrill of the long car ride to the ocean, the wind blasting in through the rolled-down windows and smelling of salt and roses. He thought a lot about his nervous stubborn brilliant sister, sitting at a desk in a Maine summer, sucking down an ocean of Coke, devouring Jeanette Winterson novels and writing intricate stories about lovers that he pretended to understand.

He shared his dinner with the cats. He fed them torn bits of beef and talked to the light:

“Remember that time I kicked in those boys’ asses who dared pick on Janet because of her big boobs? Sean and Greg, I think their names were? Pukenoses. Yeah, I got in trouble with the nuns over that one, and with dad, but it was worth it. And then Janet writes me these thank-you notes. Put em in my locker. She was a strange child. I guess we both were, comes down to it. But that’s all right.”

The glow brightened.

“I guess that makes me a weird grownup, huh, sitting here and talking to the crystal that came from outer space.” He laughed. “Yeah.”

Bartelby, a big tuxedo tom, bumped Jeremy’s wrist with his broad head. Jeremy scratched his head and the cat flopped over onto his back. He stroked the white fur on his belly. “Hey, boy. I’ve got no more sandwich to share. You got the last of it.”

Bartelby coiled up and purred. Delilah, Bartelby’s tiny all-black sister, stepped on Bartleby’s head on her way to Jeremy’s lap. She jumped with delicacy up onto his shoulder and bumped his jaw with her chin. Jeremy kissed between her ears.

“And you aren’t much better, little miss,” he added, running her tail through his fingers. He put the empty plate on the floor and both cats left him for it, sniffing the naked porcelain. He stood and took the candle holder off the sill. An old memory passed through him and brushed his mind with soft wings: himself at six years old, waking up in the middle of his bedroom floor with a toy soldier in his hands and his mother’s tired voice whispering _oh honey, you were sleepwalking, playing in your sleep, did you dream you were playing soldiers?_ And him, six years old, the dream already fading and without the words to say _no mom, I’m getting ready, it’s me and Richie Burns in the desert war and it’s so hot the flies come for miles to drink your sweat…I’m getting my practice in so I‘ll know what to do._ He looked into the candle holder at the crystal’s secret unfolding light.

“I don’t think about that,” he said. “I don’t talk about it either.”

But he remembered Richie Burns gasping for breath and the blood leaving him for the greedy dry dust. Remembered trying to hold him together long enough for the medics to arrive. Don’t you tell my mom how I died, he’d said.

Jeremy put the candle holder on the floor. “I fucking mean it. Don’t go there.”

The light burned down to a tiny spark.

“If I pick you up again, are you going to be nice?”

It flickered.

“All right then.”

He picked it up and carried it into the bedroom. The cats followed, weaving in and out of his ankles. He put the candle holder on a shelf in the closet and closed the door. “I stopped sleepwalking,” he said. “I stopped it when I got into that support group.”

Shannon’s last night flashed through his mind, how she’d gotten up in the middle of the night to pee and looked out the window and seen him climbing into the pickup and how she’d run out into the yard amidst the screeching of hot crickets and clouds of sweat-seduced mosquitoes wearing her panties and a tank top to demand just what in the hell he thought he was doing in the middle of the night. He’d started up the engine. She’d stuck her head through the rolled-down window and sucked in a deep breath to give him both barrels when she’d noticed that he was asleep. The folks at the VA hospital had warned her not to wake him when he was sleepwalking, that he night get confused and violent, but in her exasperation she’d reached in and poked his shoulder. He’d sat still. She’d poked him again and he’d awakened in a roar, and in the middle of her swearing he’d grabbed hold of her and hauled her half in through the window. One of her legs had kicked wide and knocked the glass out of the sideview mirror. He’d gotten one arm tight around her neck and was halfway to choking her when she’d scratched open his cheek. The fugue snapped. He let her go, yawned, and touched his face. He didn’t remember it, but she swore right up and down that he had looked at the blood, wiped his fingers on his boxers, scratched the back of his head, and grumbled _why’d you wake me up? I’m fuckin tired. I work all day so you can give me this shit?_ She’d lost her mind. She ran him off the property with a .30-06 rifle and he’d been forced to drive ten miles to a friend’s house in his underwear.

“Fuck you for dragging up that shit.” He pointed at the closet door. “Fuck you.”

He got undressed and climbed into bed. He laid on his side and stared out the open window at the stars.

 _I must’ve fallen asleep_. He was out in the cornfield but that there was no crater. He stood where the crater should’ve been. _I’m sleeping. This is a dream_. He felt something under his foot and stepped to one side. He heard crickets that sounded like wind-up toys. He squatted down and pried a plastic bubble out of the corn roots. He pulled the halves apart. Inside were his dogtags and Janet’s class ring. All of them were threaded on a ball chain. He stood and held then up to his face. The stone in Janet’s ring wasn’t blue. It was clear, a tiny spark burning inside like a star. He took the ring off the chain and slipped it onto his pinky. He looped the chain around his neck.

Bartelby came out of the corn. _Turn left here, Jeremy_ , he said. _Left. Here. Like me. I’m left here, too.  
_

 _What? I don’t understand_. The stone on Janet’s ring blazed to life. Its light filled the field and turned the star-filled sky the soft gray color of a dove’s breast. The stone in the house ignited, turning it into a sun. Light poured into his eyes.

 _Left here._

His lips felt made of lead.

 _Left here.  
_

 _Left---_

Jeremy’s eyes opened. Disorientation swooped into his mind. He blinked, the pool of light ahead of him blurring out of focus. It snapped back into startling clarity. He saw moving lines.

“Fuck. Fuck! Fuck!” His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Fuck! _Fuck_!”

He straightened the truck and looked in the rearview. The road behind him, black and empty, receded into the night. He looked around, breathing fast, his nerves simmering in adrenaline. His army-issue duffel sat in the passenger seat, packed full. The .30-06 rifle leaned against his knee. He looked at his lap and saw desert camo. He flicked on the blinker and turned onto the left side of the road. His headlights swept the old church into view, its burnt-out arches filled with fluttering moths and racing shadows.

“What the fuck is this, man? What the Christly fuck?”

He got out of the truck and pulled off the t-shirt he was wearing. He flung it into the truck’s bed. “I am not wearing this stuff. I am not! I am not! I am done!” He pushed down his pants only to realize that he was wearing his field boots. “Fuck,” he snarled. “Fuck shit piss _damn_!”

The crystal rolled out of his pocket. It blazed into brilliant life. He closed his fingers around it and turned his fist into a burning heart. The night air filled with a scent of heat.

“No.” Tears ran down his cheeks. “No, you bitch. No. I won’t go back there. I’ll kill myself first.”

He smelled the sun’s descent over an ocean of fire. Every molecule in his body knew that scent and pulled away from it. A strange lassitude settled over him and he felt disconnected from the function of his muscles, the connection of his bones. He pulled up his pants and retrieved the shirt. He put it on. He felt himself slip away, like he was falling asleep but still moving. He got the duffel out of the truck and slung the rifle over one shoulder. His nose dripped along with his eyes. The tears burned. “Why? Why this? Why me?”

A voice came out of the light: _Shhhhh_.

It unlaced him. He swooned into himself and set adrift on a sea of nameless sensation. His feet carried him into the ruins, past the ruins, deep into the forest. He touched the arch of stone. In a haze he put his cheek against it and caressed its curve.

He stepped through.

 

 


	9. A Weapon None Of Them Had Ever Seen

 

The heat hammered out of the sky. The riders wore mantles of pale dust. The hardpan’s flatness made it easy to see the horizon and where it began to climb. They could not be called hills, those distant, sun-weathered humps; between them and the road, all was a lifeless, glaring white. And, Vanimórë thought, those hills were further away than they looked. Desert distances were always deceptive. Scattered across the cracked ground lay the bones of animals and lathes of carriages that had strayed too far into the waste. Out here there was no shade. He felt the sun sucking moisture from his body. Neither heat or cold worried him, because he knew how much his body could take.

“We should drink,” he said. “The horses too. The thing has holed up near water.”

Lugmokí gestured. The train halted. She tipped a hand near her mouth and the maulobí nodded before dismounting and unfastened heavy bags of water. They retrieved shallow skin bowls from the back of the wagon and slopped water into them, holding them up so the horses could drink. Vanimórë drank of the warm water, sparingly at first, and opened a packet of dried meat. Lugmokí squatted in the shade of the wagon. Flies came out of nowhere, buzzing around damp mouths. She flapped her hand around her face. Far ahead the low hills shimmered, as if they, like the worlds, were unstable. It was easy to imagine movement in the rising currents of baking air.

“Trust a damn balrog to lead us here.” He folded his legs and sank down beside Lugmokí. He handed her a strip, and although he knew her strength and sensed it as something familiar, like his own, he asked:  
“How dost thou fare?”

“I’m from Mordor.” She grinned. “There are no volcanoes here. This is nothing.”

Her smile infected him. “True, although this Mordor sounds more appealing than mine. I will see it, when this is done.” He paused. “Sauron speaks through thee. Does that not feel like an invasion of thine own person?”

“No. Sometimes.” She lifted the waterbag and wet her lips. “Often when we are thinking the same thing I won’t feel him in my mind because the flavors of our thoughts taste the same. Other times I feel him, yes, but it is a welcome sensation. Most of the time he is respectful of my mind.”

“Why was he not respectful of it this morning? It angered me. He can easily speak into my mind.”

“I don’t know.”

“He seems to be the same Sauron in some respects: he uses people if it suits his purpose. I find I am glad of it.” He drank a little. “I would find a Sauron I could, if not like, at least respect, very difficult to deal with.”

“He speaks through me. That’s my job. ” She took a bite of the salted meat. “If it is your wish to speak to him directly rather than through me I will forward this request. He may turn you down.” She looked at him as she chewed and swallowed. “It is his right to turn you down as much as it is your right to ask.”

“I would rather separate thee from Sauron, yes,” he said. “I do not understand why it does not matter to thee, but…”

The maulobí stiffened. Lugmokí noticed it out of the corner of her eye. She turned. “What do you see?”

“A man, lady. He comes out of the desert.”

Vanimórë rose to his feet. He feared it was the balrog but dismissed the idea almost at once. “That is no tribesman.” His voice went quiet. “What in the Hells...?”

The man came toward them, heat shimmering around his ankles, his clothing desert-colored save for the blinding white cotton bedsheet fastened to his head. His clothes were peculiar; their pattern of colors seemed crafted to help him blend into the terrain. His big tan pack weighted him down. He wore fingerless gloves made of pale leather and what skin they could see had turned pink in the sun. Lugmokí squinted and studied the club slung across his shoulder. From this distance it looked like a stave, but the shape...there was something odd about it.

The maulobí took their bows in hand. Lugmokí held up a palm. “Wait.” She leaned toward Vanimórë. “He is fresh and unbowed by this heat. I see it in his step.”

“But he came out of the desert.” His eyes narrowed against the light. “Thou knowest there is nothing but dunes beyond those cliffs, and tribesmen out here would never travel alone. He is a Northman, by the color of his skin.”

The man halted. He waved his arms in a half-circle over his head. “Hello!”

The maulobí lifted their bows.

“No,” said Lugmokí. “Keep them down.”

“Thou art very trusting,” Vanimórë commented.

Lugmokí uncovered her face. She removed her veil and shook the dust off it. “Stay here.”

She walked toward the man. Dust rose from the impacts of her feet, blowing in tatters before her. The sun poured hot into her hair, gleaming off its dark curls. He put his arms down and started walking. The maulobí aimed their bows at him. He saw them, heard the creak of bowstrings beneath the wind, and held out his palms.

“Hey, hey, ladies. Look. It’s all right, no funny business. I swear on my mama’s name.”

Lugmokí turned around. “Stand down.”

They loosened the strings and let the arrows point to the ground.

Jeremy stood still as Lugmokí approached him. As she drew closer, he looked her up and down. “Well, hello there.” He grinned and tilted his head. “You don’t understand a single blessed word I’m saying, do you?”

She pointed to the gun and gestured that he should give it to her.

“You want my gun.” His eyebrows lifted. He unslung it from his shoulder and held it up. “You want this? Huh?”

She looked at him and waited.

“Well.” He squinted. The sun bleached out his eyelashes. “I’m not that crazy, honey.”

Vanimórë walked across to Lugmokí. “I do not understand his tongue,” he said. “And I know many. I am sure thou dost, also.”

“More than you, I should judge, but it does not matter.” Lugmokí looked the man over. “It is foreign to me as well.”

Vanimórë shifted his weight. Vanimórë observed the way he stood and how he held the odd-looking club. He looked into the stranger’s eyes. Jeremy lifted his chin a little. “His emotions are extremely…unsettled.”

“Aye, that they are.”

Vanimórë tried mind-speech, wondering if he would understand the tone of it at least. _Give her what she asks for, Man. Who art thou?_

Jeremy glanced at Vanimórë and returned his attention to Lugmokí. She held out her hands. He looked at her face, then looked over her shoulder at the maulobí, who had drawn their bows and sighted him.

“All right. All right!”

Jeremy stepped forward and laid the rifle across her palms. To Vanimórë’s surprise, she looked it over, slid back the bolt, and removed the clip. She levered out the chambered round and re-engaged the bolt with the unconscious fluid gesture of one with long experience handling such weapons and handed the clip and shell to Jeremy. He took them, looked them over, and stuffed them into one of his many pockets. Lugmokí shouldered the rifle and turned. She gestured that he should follow. Vanimórë glanced at him as he started to walk and turned his attention to the stave. He did not recognize the thing at all. Some of it was metal, he saw, and he caught a faint oily smell that reminded him of an armory. “What is it?”

“A hundred or so years ago the orcs of Gorgoroth came across a man. He was carrying a weapon none of them had ever seen. Once they caught him, following much fighting, soldiers brought him to the Tower. He was deeply maimed, but Sauron spoke with him before he perished of his wounds.” She ordered the maulobí to stand down and fetch water. “The man called it a gun. Sauron has been studying it since. He’s figured out how to build the thing and how to mix the powder, but he can’t yet make the projectiles it hurls as accurate as the originals.”

“A weapon?” The oiled metal had a strange acrid tang to it. It reminded him somewhat of Angband and the run-off from Melkor’s deepest forges. Vanimórë watched him pull off his head covering and use it to wipe the sweat off his reddened face. “So. He is not from this world either. He most certainly is not from mine.”

“An extremely dangerous weapon,” said Lugmokí. “One that can make big holes in even protected flesh from a very long distance.”

Jeremy accepted the water. He sipped and looked at the maulobí, who regarded him with indifference. “One man and all these women.” He glanced at Vanimórë. “Where I come from, we call this fantastic luck. But you don’t understand me either.” He took another sip. “So never mind.”

“I’ve not heard this tongue before,” said Lugmokí. “But Sauron has, which means that I will know what he knows of it soon enough. But there are other ways to understand.”

Vanimórë nodded. He possessed both his father and mother’s ability to interpret languages through thoughts. He would listen to the rhythm of the words while reading the tone of the mind. This man appeared strong. He _sounded_ confident, even glib, but Vanimórë knew all about the differences between what one portrayed and how one felt. “He is a warrior, then,” he said. “He bears himself as one who knows how to fight.”

“I believe so,” she said. “The other man, he who came into the Gorgoroth, was a hunter of stags. He could do little to overpower the orcs once his weapon had run out of discharges. But this one is not like him. He carries his body like it knows how to kill.”

“This is simply too strange.” Vanimórë watched her watching Jeremy as he drank. “Three people from different realities coming to this place? Much though I think my tongue ought to turn black for saying it, we should find the balrog and head to Mordor.”

“Yes,” said Lugmokí. “Take his things and bind his hands. He’ll ride in the wagon for now.”

Vanimórë nodded. He approached Jeremy and gestured, indicating even as he attempted to send the thought into his mind that he was to give up what he carried and climb into the wagon. Jeremy was not eager to do either of those things, and he did not fear Vanimórë, despite the fact that he was armed and Jeremy was not. He fought Vanimórë’s attempts to guide him into the back of the wagon, and through the manner of his fighting it was clear that he didn’t need weapons. Vanimórë’s mastery of hand-to-hand combat was the greater, and amid bucking and bellowed curse words he brought Jeremy down, pulled a leather thong from his belt, and dragged his arms back. He secured Jeremy’s wrists. When he rose, unhurt amid a dissipating cloud of dust and still belligerent, Vanimórë spread his hands. He pointed again to the wagon. Jeremy spit in the general direction of Vanimórë’s feet before climbing in.

Lugmokí grinned and chuckled behind her veil. “He has no fear at all.”

“He is angry,” he smiled. “So would I be. And thou didst play him. He was not thinking with his brains. Didst thou let me handle him so he did not have to bear the shame of being over-matched by a woman? I wager thou couldst have done it as easily.”

He felt her smile.

“He’s a warrior, he will know he has to wait, conserve his strength, learn what he can about us, before he makes any move. And he might try to escape, take provisions. I would, if I could see a way clear.”

They mounted up. The wagons trundled on over the hardpan. Vanimórë glanced back once or twice, but the maulobí knew their job as guards and did it well. The stranger sat so that he could see out.

 _So would I._

The weapon, the gun, troubled him. He could see the use in it, as he could see the use in arrows, although he preferred close-quarter combat. He wondered how it worked, and thought he would ask Lugmokí later. No doubt whatever Sauron had learned of it he would have shared with her.

 _What is happening?_ Were people crossing through doors into this Arda all across the world, or only here?

 _I can see thee_ , Nemrúshkeraz said.

Vanimórë made a hand-signal to Lugmokí and pointed.

 _How far away are we?_

 _I do not think thou wilt get here by dusk._

 _How far hast thou moved from the water?_

 _Not far. It is under a rock shelf. I can see far into the east if I just walk a few steps._

 _Stay there. We will need that water._

 _Something happened._

 _Yes, a man from another world walked out of the desert. He travels with us._

 _There is more than that._

 _Lugmokí says that something has shaken loose in the world. Perhaps in all the worlds there are. That there is instability._

 _Yes_ , Nemrúshkeraz agreed. _The Music is very strange._

 _The Music? Thou canst hear it?_

 _I was part of it, although calling it music is oversimplifying. And thou wouldst know, and hear it also, if thou wert the Vanimórë I saw in the East._

 _I am not Vanimórë the God_ , he said with a touch of exasperation. _Possibly I am, somewhere. I cannot get to that somewhere unless one of these Doors take me, so there is little use in considering it. It is intriguing, and so I will speak to thee._

There was a long pause. _Wilt thou kill me?_

Vanimórë laughed aloud. Lugmokí looked aside at him.

“The balrog asks me if I will kill it,” he explained. _Dost thou want me to?_

_  
_


	10. Dance

 

Jeremy walked up to her. He folded his arms and nodded to the rifle. He grinned. “You’re quite the shot.”

Lugmoki shouldered the rifle and picked up the shell casing. “Would you have done better?”

“Maybe.” The grin widened. “Not by much,” he chuckled. He scratched the back of his head. “So…ah…where’d someone like you learn to shoot?”

“There is one other of these machines in Middle-earth. It happens to be so that I am able to use it.” Lugmokí picked up his hand, opened the fingers, and placed the empty shell on his palm. “It is far away and well-guarded.”

Vanimórë smothered a smile. “May I speak with him?”

Lugmokí looked at him. “Of course, if you are capable.”

“I will do my poor best.” He searched for the words, which felt abrupt and blocklike in his mouth. “Why come you…” He gestured. “Like this, with arms? You knew…of Doors? The Doors from world to world?”

“I don’t talk about that. Not with you, not with anyone.”

Vanimórë’s brows rose. “Then you know.” _Every-one seems to know about these doors but me_. He felt a brief flicker of exasperation. _Either that or Sauron kept more from me than I have ever dreamed -- which is not impossible_. “I came here through Door. A door. You came…ready…prepared.”

“Yeah, I’m here,” agreed Jeremy with a tight little grin. “Crazy enough. And that’s all you need to worry about.”

“The Doors worry me,” Vanimórë said. “Not you.”

He turned to Lugmokí, reverting to Black Speech. “I think thou wilt get more from him than I. But he is not surprised, and that in itself surprises me. I suppose he will tell thee. Or tell Sauron.”

“Now that’s not nice. Switching languages in the middle of a conversation like that.” Jeremy looked at Lugmokí. “Come to think of it, he didn’t bother introducing himself either. What’s the matter with his manners?”

“Languages are not his strong point,” said Lugmoki. “In his concentration, I imagine the graces may have slipped his mind. Regard it a momentary lapse.”

“Your warrior ladies took my cigarettes.” Jeremy nodded at the cloth on the ground. “May I have them back, please? I promise I won’t…make any trouble with them.”

“Your tobacco is what you want.”

“Yes.”

Lugmokí squatted down. She picked up the packages and sniffed them. One of them was made from some sort of metallic paper and had a picture of a camel on it. She picked it up. It smelled like poor quality leaf, mostly stems, like the mountain tribes used. She passed it to him along with his flint-and-steel. “I’ll have the steel back when you’re done with it.”

He winked. “Sure thing.”

He shook loose a thin tube of paper and tucked the colored end into his amused mouth. He glanced up as he struck the wheel of his flint with this thumb, kindling a thin flame. He brought it to the tip of the cigarette. He took a puff. The pungent, familiar scent of burning leaf filled the air. Vanimórë shook his head. How could this stranger not wonder what had happened to him?

Onau and one of the other maulobí busied themselves with preparing food. Another unpacked lanterns, filled them with oil, and kindled them against the falling dusk. A jug of wine was uncorked and the sharp sweet scent filled the air.

“I am called Vanimórë,” he said, and inclined his head. “Excuse my manners. I...require answers, that is all.”

“Mmmm...a nice deep double-lungful of death. That’ll calm the nerves.” The words came out underscored by smoke. “Well, Vanimórë, requiring ain’t getting, is it? I’m Jeremy. Jeremy Lambert, o’ the American Midwest.” He started to laugh. Smoke leaked from of his nostrils. “But I imagine you know that already.”

“There will be food soon,” said Lugmokí.

“I do not know an Am--Merican Mid West, Jeremy Lambert,” Vanimórë looked toward the cliffs as they melted into the darkness. “My world is like -- similar? -- to this one. I think yours…is not.” He accepted a cup of wine from Onau and drank it. “You seem to care not. I care much. very much.”

“No, you’re right about that,” said Jeremy. He took a cup of wine, sniffed it, and looked around for a place to put it. “My world isn’t much like this one. And…you’re right.” He held the cigarette in one hand and the cup in the other, looking for a place to sit. He looked at Lugmokí and glanced at Vanimórë. His eyebrows lifted and his smile turned wry. “I don’t give a flying candy-coated fuck.”

Vanimórë did not understand his last words, but the meaning came through clear enough. Anger would be futile. What might’ve been a common interest between them interested Jeremy no more than the dust beneath his feet. In time, perhaps, his attitude would change. He gave Jeremy his back.

“I will leave him to thee, then,” he said to Lugmokí. “We should reach the cliffs tomorrow and I will find the balrog. Or he will come to us. And after…I need to go to Mordor. Everything is an unanswerable question, but Sauron would seem to know more than any-one else.” He bent his head and walked to the perimeter of the camp, where he folded his arms and looked east.

Jeremy watched him go. “He’s a sensitive fellow, isn’t he?”

Lugmokí sat on an unrolled rug while her guards lit the lanterns. Jeremy followed her and took a seat beside her. She sipped her wine. “Jeremy…do you know where you are?”

“No,” he said.

Lugmokí put the cup down. “Do you know where you’re from?”

“Uh, yeah, that’s a strange question. Why would you ask me that?”

Lugmokí turned to face him. “Tell me where you’re from.”

He laughed. “Well, okay.” He rubbed under his nose. “I, Jeremy Lambert, hail from America.” He flourished his palms as though he’d just completed an impressive trick.

“Yes,” said Lugmokí. “Where in America?”

“In the Midwest.” He sat cross-legged and folded his hands in his lap. “I live in the Midwest.”

“Yes.” Lugmokí nodded and smiled. “Where in the Midwest?”

He smirked and nodded and opened his mouth. He closed it again. He imagined his home, the farmhouse he’d inherited from his father, and the cornfields, and the big old trees that surrounded the living part of the property. He could see roads but the roadsigns in his mind were blank. He saw shapes blocked in pastels on a map. He furrowed his brow and leaned back a little. His face lit up. “Iowa. I live in Iowa.”

“Yes,” said Lugmokí. She touched his hand. “Where in Iowa?”

Jeremy looked into the darkening sky. Blur of corn, taste of candyfloss and the ocean. Janet and rugged pink roses. “I grew up in Maine. I remember that…but I can’t see my mailbox.” He looked at her. “But I live in Iowa.”

“You don’t know where,” said Lugmokí.

The shock of it dawned in his face. “No. I don’t remember the name of the town. I try to think of it and I get all these weird images jumbled up in my head.”

“The forgetfulness,” she said. “It comes to many who go through the doors. It may get worse. It may stabilize.” She smiled. “May be in time that it will go away and you’ll remember all of the things you were before you came here.”

“It’s there.” He touched his head. “I feel my brain on it like a dog with a bone. Just chewing.”

“Don’t trouble over it.” She took a drink of wine. “If it’s gone, it’s gone. It will come back when it chooses to.”

Vanimórë felt the balrog on the edge of his mind, like a man lingering at a door he is not sure he should enter. He waited. _Sauron is going to get a rather diverse company entering Mordor_. The sense of panic rose, tangled with the resentment and fear that the word _Mordor_ mapped inside him. He told himself it was a different place, a different ruler. He looked back, saw Lugmokí talking to the newcomer, his body language speaking for him. Vanimórë waited until she swallowed and walked back to them.

“It is still there,” he said. “Shall I go and bring it alone, tomorrow, or wilt thou come?”

“It may come to us,” said Lugmokí.

Jeremy looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re tracking a creature into the wastes,” she said. “And taking it back to Mordor, if it will go.”

“It? What the hell do you mean, it?“ His eyes twinkled. “Is this like...a rogue camel, or something?”

Lugmokí chuckled. “No.”

Jeremy’s smile widened. “So is it like a rogue vampire camel, or….something?”

Lugmokí tamped the urge to laugh with a small smile. “No. It’s a balrog.”

Jeremy tipped his head back and half-laughed, half-giggled. He stretched out his legs, crossing them at the ankle, and rested on the heels of his hands. “So you mean it’s like a…RAWR, YOU SHALL NOT PASS balrog?”

“I don’t know what that means,” said Lugmokí.

Vanimórë glanced at her. “You know what a balrog is, though. They exist in your world also?”

“Sure,” said Jeremy. “In some dead guy’s imagination.”

“Dead guy?” repeated Vanimórë. “Well, they are not…imagination here. They are…” He searched for the words. “Fire, spirits of fire, like the sun, who took...bodies, long ago. They served Melkor.” Would he recognize the name? “This one came here, like you and like me. It is lost and confused.”

“Oh really.” Jeremy’s eyebrows went up. He sat up and gestured at the camp. “So this is Middle-earth, then.”

“Yes,” said Lugmokí.

He burst into laughter. “Well.” He put out his cigarette. “Someone ought to tell Peter Jackson that he’s doing it wrong.”

“It is a Middle-earth,” Vanimórë said. “It seems there is more than one.”

“That explains it, then,” said Jeremy, struggling to keep a straight face. “More than one. So this is the Prince of Persia version.” He burst into giggles. “Or not.” The giggles devolved into out-and-out laughter. He stood up and swayed on his feet. He gestured. “Gimme back my shit. I want to go somewhere with better actors.”

“This is real,” said Lugmokí. “We’re real. So are you.”

“I admit I understand hardly any of your words,” Vanimórë said, watching him, wondering if he were ill or drunk. “But I can certainly vouch for this lady’s…reality.”

Jeremy looked into his cup. “What is this shit?”

“It’s palm wine,” said Lugmokí.

“It takes like honeyed dog piss.”

“It is an...acquired taste,” Vanimórë said, a little amused, wondering if he might be pretending drunkenness. “Perhaps you would like to…sleep it off?”

Jeremy tossed the cupful of liquid onto the sand. “Shouldn’t be drinking this stuff out here anyway. Dries you out.”

Vanimórë watched him, aware that he was very much in the way. Trying to initiate any sort of conversation as to how this Jeremy person knew of Middle-earth would run into the sand and disappear there like the palm-wine. “True enough.”

Jeremy picked up a date and ripped into it with his teeth. “So what do you all do for entertainment around here?”

“We talk and tell stories, and sometimes we dance or have contests.” Lugmokí made room for him to sit. “Life on the road is a simple one.”

“I could dance for you,” offered Vanimórë, straight-faced, with a look in Lugmokí’s direction. He did not know if she could dance, but he wagered she could make an attempt by the grace in her movements. He looked at Jeremy. “But, I am sure you would not appreciate it.”

“Thanks…but no thanks.” Jeremy took a bite of dried meat. “No hard feelings.”

“Surely there are none taken,” said Lugmokí, shooting Vanimórë a look. She stood. “There are instruments in the wagon. I’ll have the maulobí fetch them.”

Jeremy tossed up a date and caught it in his mouth. He sat down and pulled the plate of food into his mouth. “It’s just not a right proper desert adventure without dancing girls.” He glanced at Vanimórë. “Am I right?”

“There are no hard feelings,” Vanimórë agreed, with a hard smile.

Inwardly he cursed himself. And what of his own motives? They were no less honorable than Jeremy’s. He wanted to see Lugmokí dance. The stars were sparking on the vast unfolding of a dark sky, and the thought of Lugmokí dancing under them, her body illuminated by flames sheathed in red glass, was…more than exciting.

He folded his legs as he sat. The maulobí set the lanterns in a ring, and they spread several of the small carpets as to make a space for feet. Lugmokí went into one of the tents and remained there as the guards brought out a collection of instruments: drums, rattles, a stringed instrument, something made of reeds. The other women made a space for themselves at the edge of the circle and sat down, each of them taking an instrument in hand. Lugmokí came out of the tent, swathed from head to toe in a deep blue veil. At the bottom edge a scattering of tiny clear stones were sewn into the silk, and in the strained light they glittered like stars.

She went to the center of the circle and lowered herself into a cross-legged position. She had cleaned the grit off her face and lined her eyes with fresh kohl. She sat erect, looking back and forth, from Vanimórë’s face to Jeremy’s.

“This is a serious thing,” she said. “These dances that I will do for you. They are performed for dignitaries and the leaders of countries. Do you understand?”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah.”

Vanimórë inclined his head.

The warmth of the flickering light made her eyes darker than they were. The gold on her earrings shivered. “Do I have your respect?”

Jeremy straightened up. He put the plate aside. He nodded. “Yes.”

“Of course,” said Vanimórë.

Lugmokí stood and put her palms together. She bowed over them and closed her eyes. The music started up, slow rolling taps on a drum, staccato and holding the seconds; her body seemed still, a vessel formed out of shadow and moonlight. The rhythm of the taps quickened, rising in pace until her hips quivered; the posture of her body funneled all motion deep inside itself: the beat of her heart shivered in the flesh of her hips.

Silence flooded in from the surrounding desert on a tide of gentle wind.

The tapping stopped. Her hips froze. The rhythm resumed, overlaid by the richness of a second drum, its percussion deeper and more resonant. Her face softened, and below the shadows of her lashes her eyes opened, offering a glimpse of their fire-dilated darkness, the gleam of her regard. Her arms unfolded from her chest and lifted up into arches, the silk in her movement riding the currents between the beats. The notes in her bones made winged creatures of her hands. Her feet turned, the sway in her spine pulled along, her arms loosening into centrifugal force. The hissing pulses of a sharp rattle drove themselves into the insistent beat. Her hands turned into the spiral, opening her cocoon.

Jeremy caught a glimpse of nipples. His breath stopped. The silk fell away, flowing out from the center of her body in blue waves. A veil of abalone beads obscured the bottom half of her face. A heavy necklace composed of ropes of multicolored stones rested on her bare chest. The black cotton skirt of the Gorgoroth flared out over her thighs and a belt of wrought metal medallions and purple stones flashed silver coins, bright tassels, and long thin locks of white hair. The reddened lantern light flashed across her skin, gleaming in the sheen of sweat on the undersides of her breasts. She lowered the span of the silk and spun it around herself, the wealth of her loosened hair flying, feet stepping around and around in quickening circles. She released one end of the veil and bent at the waist, the precision of her circle wavering. The silk flew out over the lanterns and into the stillness of the night.

 _Like watching myself, as a woman, had I been taught to dance not merely as an odalisque_. Vanimórë’s heart was captured by the drum, by the movements of her body. These were not the dances performed by women who sold their bodies for coin, but they were no less sensual. His skin flushed, blood flooding his loins.

Her heels stomped, the motion of her hips grew sharper, and her body melted into a stylized representation of war: her arms flashed through the air as though wielding invisible swords, the round of one shoulder leading her torso into a deep and graceful twist, and she spun around once with her belly parallel to the ground and her face contorted before her shoulders swung wide, balancing on the fulcrum of her waist. Her head rolled back, an arm unfolding to the sky, beseeching, her wrist trailing fingertips in a delicate spiral. Her neck arched, her chest thrust skyward, and her body slid into a deep backbend.

Jeremy’s eyes followed the deepening arc of her belly, the smooth line of muscle channeled by her hipbones, and for a brief moment all of his thought succumbed to the image of licking all the way to the apse of her ribs, tasting the salt of her skin; the music and the slow hot pulse in his cock made him think of the desert priestesses of old, painted women gathering desire, holding it in the cups of their cunts, spilling it on the altars of goddesses.

Her forearms crossed each other as her knees folded her slowly onto the ground. She remained still and soft, hair sprawled and arms loose. There was a beat of silence. At the sound of the drums her hipbones lifted. Her belly hollowed, pushed out, dipped inward. Chains of beads slid down around her neck. She turned her head to one side, lifting with her ribs. She slowed the undulation down into heartbeats. Her eyes were closed. Through the strands of her veil her lips were flushed, like she had been eating pomegranates. Her belly quivered to a rapid plucking of strings.

Vanimórë felt laughter as the fist of his confined erection throbbed against his breeches. It came from someplace very distant; perhaps it slipped out of that other Middle-earth and rode the currents between the words and into his mind. Lugmokí breathed soft fire through his flesh, banishing it. He endured the pain of arousal because he could; he suffered confinement because there was nothing else he could do. He felt the Mother, very close, close so that he expected to feel her hand on his shoulder, but she was presence only: a smile of partisanship, of delight.

Lugmokí arched up, lifting herself to her knees. She coiled her wrists, weaving her arms like snakes into space, then fell forward onto the palms of her hands. She lowered her face to the carpet and brushed it with her cheek, looking up beneath her lashes, shoulders sliding from side to side as she swooped down and up, rising through the tousled curtain of her hair and out of the puddle of her skirt. Her body unfolded, straightening, her arms sweeping in a circle and lifting overhead. The drums quickened, drowning Vanimórë’s sharp inhalation of breath. His hands clasped so tightly together in his lap that the bones creaked. She froze the motion of her arms, her face sinking into ecstasy. She let the movement sink into her hips. She held it there, and as she slunk around the perimeter of the circle the percussion opened up, turning sharp and quick. Her hips bounced to the music, riding it, her undulating spine pulling the notes in, sending them up to her shoulders, coiling them through the joints in her arms.

 _Care_ , a voice whispered in her mind. _Take care or you will overwhelm_.

She kicked out into a spin, whirling tight and hard, rising and falling inside her rotation. The music crashed to a halt. She dropped to the ground, breathing hard.

Jeremy started to clap.

Lugmokí lifted her head. She smiled, hair sticking to her sweaty cheeks. “Were one of you a visiting dignitary or the leader of your country, here is where I would dance with your sword.”

“I’m wishing I had a sword right now,” said Jeremy. “Wishing hard, actually.”

Vanimórë unclenched his hands, tamping control into his voice, enough to speak, not enough to appear unaffected. She knew anyway and concealing his reactions would be a fruitless task. “It is a pity I am not here in any official capacity, Lady, for that I would like to see. That…is more than a dance.”

Lugmokí sat back on her heels and reached behind to take the veil off her face. “It’s very old. It’s supposed to draw from the different regions of Mordor, but it doesn’t always. Improvisation is encouraged and left in the hands of the dancer.”

She tossed the veil onto the carpet and shook her fingers through the sweaty roots of her hair. Jeremy leaned forward and offered his water. She took it, smiled at him, held it up in a toast, and drank.

“Yes. It is very old. I recognize some of it.” Vanimórë picked up her veil and folded it. It carried her scent. “When Lúthien danced for Morgoth, it left a lasting impression on him. He wanted her, and so, when his…slaves danced, they were taught to try and emulate her. I do not know if that is true here, but if she danced like thou hast, I no longer wonder at his desire to see it reenacted again and again.”

“Yes,” she said, pleased with his knowledge. “It is so. The tradition was brought into Mordor by Sauron.” She looked at Jeremy. “Over the years it mingled with and was influenced by the Orcish dances.” Her eyes returned to Vanimórë. “But yes, at its heart, it is Lúthien’s dance.”

Jeremy tried not to look at her breasts. He picked up a piece of meat off his plate but didn’t eat it.

“She would have to have some power indeed,” said Vanimórë, “to make Angband fall into slumber if she danced thus.”

He heard his voice dip into the timbre of raw hunger. He noticed Jeremy’s attempt at avoidance and his failure -- he might have had a rock in his hand for all he was aware of the food. Vanimórë did not try to keep his eyes away; he appreciated her beauty and there was no shame in it. There was only the magnetism of her power, the vortex that led into her. He would step into it now, on those rugs, and she knew it, but her giving, her withholding, was in her gift. He wished the stranger had walked out of the desert into any other world, but he was Lugmokí’s guest and given the hospitality of the camp, and even in his Arda such things were sacrosanct.

Onau fetched the blue veil out of the desert and carried it to her. Lugmokí accepted it with a nod and wrapped it around herself. She picked up Jeremy’s cup and finished off the water. She handed it back to him. He tossed the dried meat back onto the plate and held up the cup. “Do you want more? I’ll, you know, get it if you want it.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “But no.”

“Okay. I’ll get some for myself, then. Do you want anything else?”

“There is bread and honey in the wagon,” she said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

Vanimórë flicked him a glance, and then he said to her, in Black Speech. “It is easier to speak to thee in this tongue, but thou canst interpret for him if thou wilt, this is simply easier for me.” He rose. “The dance did not help my hungers, Lady, and he has been thinking only of bedding thee since he came. Neither of us have claim on thee, but I know how this will go, for I have captained warriors most of my life. I know exactly how men behave when two or more want one woman.” He watched the light curve over her breasts like hands of light, catching the tiny beads of perspiration. “Thou art not making it easy for either of us.”

Jeremy frowned. “What did he---”

Lugmokí held up a hand. She switched to Black Speech. “If you would excuse yourself from my presence, it would please me to have you do it in a manner that all understand. Furthermore, the hungers of your body are not my responsibility.” She paused. “You might have thought of that before you so subtly brought up the possibility of dancing.”

“I did,” he replied. “But I wanted to see it, nevertheless. What man would not? But I wonder, is there a reason behind it? Does Sauron want us tractable, following thee like sheep? I will anyway, as I have nowhere else to look for answers.”

Her face went still. “There are many who watch me dance and don’t suffer for it. There are many who accept it as an art and appreciate it thus. I have performed these dances thousands of times. I’ll not accept fault for your body’s unruliness.”

“Hey.” Jeremy’s tone sharpened. “Can we use English, please?”

“No,” Vanimórë said to him, in English. “I will speak thy tongue when I have to, Man.” He turned his back and reverted to Black Speech. “How strange thou art, all women, turning thyself on and off like lamps. I do appreciate thine art, but I cannot look at thee dancing, sitting, standing, or riding, and not want thee. And nor can he. I acquit thee of taunting us, for I think that would be beneath thee, but I wanted to be honest with thee. And yes, I will remove myself and find the balrog, for we seem to be bound as traveling companions, no matter how much we may scrape against one another. I will find it and return in the morning.”

He bowed briefly and strode to his tent and buckled on his sword-harness. He picked up a waterskin and slung it over one shoulder, knowing he needed time to fit the long-worn, long-known control over himself that Lugmokí had so casually shattered. He was unused to being free, unused to any-one like her, and he did not know what he would do, even what he would be, if he had too much dangerous freedom.

The light of the camp faded. It was easier out there, alone in the immensity of night. Perhaps it would be better not to go back until he had adapted, if he could adapt. It was, he knew, not Lugmokí’s fault, but if she blamed him, she was in error. The fault simply lay in his coming to this world.

 _I do not know_ , he thought to her, _how it would be for thee if thou hadst come into my world after freedom, slavery, seen as the property of any-one strong enough to overpower thee, to be treated as less than thou art. I have come from that to this. I never had the freedom to want without his voice in my mind, his suggestions, mockery, orders, his punishment. I do not know how to be free_. It was too strange, too intoxicating. I think, he thought to himself, that I need somehow to return to my own world, where I knew the rules and the consequences are comfortable as old boots broken in upon a long road. He looked up into the profusion of stars. If it is possible. If it is not, then I do not know.


	11. The Door (II)

 

Jeremy watched him go. He snorted. “What a prick.”

Lugmokí stood and dusted off her skirt. “He blames me for his hard-on. Rather, he blames me for his inability to handle the fact that he has a hard-on.”

Jeremy’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh. I see.”

Lugmokí went into her tent. She pulled off her dancing clothes, tossed them into a corner, and climbed back into her dusty robe. She emerged, tying her hair into a ponytail, and went to the wagon. Jeremy watched her pass by him and followed her. She pulled back the flaps, climbing inside. “Do you want any?”

“Um…sure.”

She pulled a small jar out of a box packed tight with palm leaves. “Here. Hold this.”

He took it, turning it over in his hands. He looked at the lines in the clay as he leaned against the side of the wagon. “So, that guy. Vanimórë.” He looked up. “Is he your husband or something?”

Lugmokí laughed, loosening the drawstrings on a bag of flatbreads. “No.”

“Or your…” He shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know what word you guys use.” He righted the jar and looked at her. “Boyfriend? Partner?”

Lugmokí pulled one of the flatbreads apart. “No.” She folded one half and handed it to him. “Do you want to open it or shall I?”

Jeremy looked at the jar. “Oh! Yeah. Either way is fine.” He held at eye level and turned it around. “It looks like you need a knife or something, though. To get through the wax.”

“Use the thing that came out of the gun. The projectile’s shell.”

“I could do that.” He fished the shell out of his pocket. “I have to admit,” he said with a one-sided grin, “this is a creative use for a bit of ammo casing. Not one I’ve ever used before.”

“If it doesn’t work I’ll get a knife,” she said.

He used the edge to scrape at the wax. There wasn’t a lot of it, and the night air was warm enough to keep it soft. It loosened from the clay in translucent curls. “Looks like the stopper’s jammed in there pretty tight.”

“Just…” Lugmokí took the jar from his hands and squeezed the cork. “Like this.” She levered the lid and turned it over. Honey crystals clung to the underside. “Come.” She moved over. “Sit.” She scooped some of the crystals with a fingertip and licked them off. She smiled. “There’s room.”

Jeremy hopped up beside her and sat cross-legged. She dipped her bread into the honey and passed the jar over to him. He dipped his and took a bite. The sweetness made the insides of his cheeks tingle.

“Wow.” He shook his head a little. “That’s some sweet honey. What kind is it?”

“It’s date blossom honey.”

“It’s…uh…intense.”

“Here.” She handed him the lid. “Have some of the crystals.”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “That’s okay. This is giving me enough of a sugar rush.”

Lugmokí fitted the lid back into the jar. She leaned back and stretched, reaching overhead to put it back in its box. Jeremy took another bite of bread and chewed, watching her. She tossed the bag of bread over her shoulder, aiming for its crate. She craned her neck and grinned. “Made it. Barely.”

“She shoots. She scores.” He chuckled. “In the dark, even.”

She settled back on her heels. “What does that mean?”

His eyes closed and he shook his head. He smiled. “Never mind.”

“I won’t.”

Jeremy folded up the last of his bread, popped it into his mouth, and leaned back on the heel of one hand. He chewed and swallowed, looking out over the darkened landscape. He lifted his chin toward it. “Is he coming back?”

“No.” Lugmokí wiped a smudge of honey from the corner of her mouth and sucked it off the pad of her thumb. “He’s gone after the balrog alone and will return in the morning.”

He straightened up, looking at her as he did it. “I see.”

She returned his gaze. He moved her ponytail to one side, and when she didn’t pull away, he leaned over and kissed the curve of her neck. Her eyes closed. His lips were soft, and he exhaled before doing it again, a little higher. Her lips parted. He touched the opposite side of her neck and her fingers came up and grazed the back of his hand. He moved closer and with the third kiss he opened his mouth, tasting the skin beneath her ear. The roots of her hair prickled. Her face turned toward his. She opened her eyes and he palmed the turn in her jaw. He brought his mouth in close to hers. She ran the backs of her fingers along his forearm. He hovered there, breathing on her lips. Her body turned toward him and he took her hand, pulling back just enough to look at her, and as he held her eyes, he placed her hand on the shape of his collarbone. Her breath paused. His nose grazed hers. He kissed her jaw, came back to her mouth, brushed it with his lips, and kissed her. She ran her fingers across the rough skin of his cheek. He moaned a little.

“I need to.” Her breath came soft and quick. “I-I need to…”

He nuzzled the corner of her mouth. “What?”

She turned into his face. “I don’t know.”

He grinned.

Onau cleared her throat. “My apologies, lady.”

Lugmokí startled. She pulled back and looked down. “Um…yes, Onau.” She nodded. “Speak.”

“Would you have us clear the circle?”

“Yes. Please. Stow the carpets and take a pair of lanterns for yourselves.”

“And the weapon?”

She blushed. “Keep it safe.”

Onau glanced at Jeremy, gave the slightest hint of a nod, and turned around. Lugmokí watched her walk away. Jeremy put a hand on her shoulder, letting it slide down her arm. She rose off her knees.

 _Thou art a fool_. Vanimórë knew it, wondering if this distant voice was Sauron from his own world or if it was part of himself putting on the airs of Mordor. _Thou art feeling as a man would, were he born in a room and lived in that room all his life, never knowing there was a world beyond it, until one day, some-one opens the door._

Yes. It was an apt enough analogy.

 _And Lugmokí, thou wouldst agree, is not responsible for it, for herself, for the way she affects thee. It is not her fault thou art here, nor is it that of the man. All thy life thou hast had to control fear, hate and love; it is the only way for thee to live. Is it not just as important here as it is in thine own world? When everything may be sliding toward chaos?_

The swords hissed out of their sheaths and he slammed them down on the hardpan, feeling the ring of the impact through his bones. He set his teeth, then slid them back and folded his arms, lifting his face to the pour of starlight.

 _Very well_.

He reached inside himself, back to the Vanimórë who had ridden into the caravansary south of Maresh: Sauron’s son, Sauron’s slave and all that implied. He moved through the broken land between then and now, dragging the ragged edges of himself together. He could only exist as this Vanimórë, the man who had learned to control even his thoughts. It was difficult. Not because she was a woman, but because he was accustomed to command. Yet he had abased himself before his father often enough. He would bow to her, and before the man, and endure their reactions.

He retraced his steps. One of the maulobí was walking from the wagon, making quick gestures. The others shook out the rugs and started rolling them. He saw Lugmokí step out of the wagon and he raised his hand. She raised hers in return. He walked to it, where Jeremy sat just inside the curtains and chewed on a piece of bread.

“I came to…apologize.” He chose the words of Jeremy’s language with care. “To you. To both of you. I am indeed responsible for my own body, and I am...mortified…is that the word? At my lack of control. My words were ill-mannered and...crass? I should know better. I do. It is simply the…freedom. It has pulled the ground – my world – and all I know, from under my feet. But I will find my balance.” He drew his twin blades and felt all around him tense. Like the warriors who pledged themselves to him, he crossed them at his breast, went down on one knee, and laid them on the ground. Withdrawing his hands from the hilts, he bent his head. “This is your world, Lady. Until we part ways, I put myself under your command.”

“Rise,” she said. “That will not be necessary.” She cleared her throat. “I will accept your apology.”

For a heartbeat he was surprised, and then he realized he should not be. Lugmokí was a diplomat.

“My thanks,” he said, not touching his swords. The steel caught fire as one of the maulobí walked past with a lamp. “That is gracious, and I am aware of it. Yet, I would like to be of use. What may I do?”

She inclined her head. “Nothing you haven’t already done.”

He fought to quash his wry amusement. Her face fell into shadow under the coils of hair until the starlight caught at its whiteness. “I am at your service, Lady.”

“Then I will give you leave,” she said. “My maulobí have the management of the camp well in hand.” She glanced at the blades. “You may arm yourself should it ease your mind to do so.” She paused. “In future, do not speak to me that way again. Do you understand?”

He read nothing of her mind, nothing in her voice. He took his swords, drew a cloth from his belt, and wiped the few grains of sand from the blades. He sheathed them. Her eyes were dark, fathomless. “I will go armed,” he replied. “I always do so. Yes, I understand. You sound a little like my father.” A faint smile bent his mouth. “In a strange way, that is reassuring.”

“Very well.” Her eyes moved back and forth between them. They fell away, turning toward the tents. “I will take a meal, in my tent, alone.” She folded her arms and looked down. “When I have finished, Jeremy will be put in his bonds for the night and he will sleep in the wagon. Vanimórë, you may accept guard of him if you wish, but if not the task will fall to Onau at least until midnight comes and then she will choose her successor.”

“I have to sleep tied up?”

Lugmoki looked into his eyes. Her voice lowered a touch. “You aren’t trustworthy.”

He looked at her mouth. “Fair enough.”

“The gun stays with me.” She looked at Vanimórë. “The bolts stay with you. Is this acceptable?”

Again, she had surprised him. He himself would not have let Jeremy remain loose through the night, but he had thought Lugmokí might be softer; it was a preconceived idea formed in another world, and a mistake on his part. Dana would have been amused. He had never dealt with women of power save the Mother, and she had no need of rule or command.

“Yes. I can guard him whenever you wish. I do not sleep much, as you do not. But I would like to speak to you in private, just the same, at some time.”

She nodded. “Then it is done. Onau will take the first watch and you will have the midnight watch.” She bent her head, knees bobbing in a strange combination of bow and curtsy. A soft yet cultivated smile touched her lips. “I leave you now.”

Jeremy’s eyes moved over her face. “Good night.”

“Eru watch and keep you,” she said.

“Rest well.”

“Aye, and you as well,” she said.

Vanimórë bowed to her, sketched a gesture to Jeremy, and went to the second wagon for wine, oil and water. In the tent, he stripped, beat sand from his breeches and tunic, and he worked oil into his harness. _Very well, it is not so easy as I might think_ , he admitted. _Lugmokí is correct in her handling of the situation. Father, thou wouldst be proud of her, but then, in a way, thou didst create her, and now more than ever I see the touch of your hand upon her fëa_. He unbound his hair, combed it, and bound it back. The bolts from the weapon lay at his right, and he frowned at them, then folded them back into the leather scrip. He pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes for a moment, and waited for midnight.

***

 _You don’t wish my council._

Lugmokí rubbed her face with her hands. _No._

 _Why not?_

“I don’t need it.” She took a bite of meat and tossed the trip onto her plate. _I will handle this myself._

 _Did the outlander make this gun?_

Lugmokí sighed. _I don’t know._

 _In another time, in another circumstance, you would know this. You would’ve known within the first hour of holding it in your hands. What has changed?_

Lantern light flickered on the silk walls. _It is a lot of ego to manage. I feel the strain. Now there is a third in the waste and I must manage him as well, and there is the thought of Nymashúzet, who will arrive when she wills it._

 _Had you thought of this before giving your body to the twinner…_

Lugmokí said nothing, aloud or in her mind, but her lips pressed together and she rebuffed him with her feelings. _I didn’t know there would be others._

 _Chaos_ , said Sauron. _You know better. There is always more than there is._

 _Yes._

 _He gives you great pleasure._

She nodded. _Yes_.

 _It is the pleasure of twins, of those who were one body in the womb._

 _Yes._ Lugmokí pushed her plate aside and laid down on her bed. _It is so._

 _He would have you if you went to him. Such would provide relief for both of you. Why don’t you?_

 _The stability of this encampment strains at its one thread. I would not cut it for a frivolous reason._

 _I want to know about this gun. I want to know about the outlander. Speak with him._

Lugmokí covered her head with a blanket. _In the morning._

 _He is awake. He will be for many hours._

Lugmokí shoved the blanket aside. _I know._

 _Easy sleep is not in his blood._

Lugmokí looked at the tent’s ceiling. She drew three circles in her mind and her lips shaped words: stone, iron, adamant. _I know_. She locked thoughts of Jeremy away behind those walls. _A war of his time still dwells in his mind. It is always close._

 _I am greatly interested in this war._

 _Yes, I know._

 _I would hear lore of it._

 _I need my mind to myself. I need rest._

 _Tomorrow you will reach Nemrúshkeraz._

 _Yes._ She sighed. _Tomorrow._

She sat up, closed her eyes, and drew a circle around her head three times. She smelled oil and the day’s heat leaving the sand. “Stone, iron, adamant,” she whispered.

She felt herself contained within herself. She listened inside the gated space of her mind and heard only silence. The only feelings she felt were her own. She took in a deep breath.

She got up. Without bothering to change her clothes she left the tent.

***

Jeremy leaned against the place where the crate of honey met the back wall of the wagon. His hands were tied behind his back, and this position supported each shoulder while giving his hands room and his head a place to rest. The starlight was brighter than anything he was used to, and through a split in the wagon’s covering he watched the silhouette of the guard called Onau. A tall and muscular dark-skinned woman, she reminded him of a cross between the Klingons of Star Trek, a professional basketball player, and the Amazons of myth.

He was nodding on the edge of thin sleep when he heard feet on the ground. He startled with a soft grunt and peered through the darkness. Lugmokí had taught him the words for water and elimination, and how to say I don’t need anything, but as he listened to the ties loosen and the heavy cloth move in the dark, all of the Black Speech words evaporated out of his mind.

“Onau?”

“Shhh.”

He grinned. “Hi.”

The floor creaked beneath Lugmokí’s weight and light silky fabric brushed the boards. She knotted the curtains closed, shuffled around, and crawled into the back of the wagon. Her knee bumped his thigh as she knelt beside him, reaching overhead. A loose fold of her dress grazed his cheek. He listened to her breath, the warm scent of her skin filling the small space and mingling with the sweetness of dates. Laces scraped through grommets. A slice of ceiling folded back, revealing a tight spray of stars.

“You can color me surprised,” he said.

She eased herself into the tight space beside him, her dress whispering across his lap. Her hair hung over one shoulder in a thick black braid. Starlight gleamed in the whites of her eyes and made deep shadows of the angles in her face.

“Hey.” He struggled to sit up. He smiled and his voice softened. “Hey.”

“Did you make the gun?”

“What?” He shook his head. “No. I bought it.”

“Do you know how to make one?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.” He pushed himself up with his feet, leaning on one shoulder. His eyes moved over her face. He smiled, teeth gleaming in the dark. “Untie me?”

She leaned her temple against the wall. She touched the collar of his t-shirt and ran her finger beneath the chain of his dogtags. “Why do you keep your hair so short?”

He looked up at her. “Because I…” He swallowed. “Like it.”

She rubbed the dogtags between her fingers. She looked down at them. “Is this the fashion among all the men in your world?”

“Untie me,” he whispered.

With a fingernail, Lugmokí traced the broad shape of his jaw. He looked at her, breath fluttering, with hooded eyes. She leaned over and kissed the space beneath his ear. He let out a sharp breath and closed his eyes. She caressed his nape, licking the edge of his earlobe. His body softened and he started to pant.

“God, that’s nasty,” he whispered.

She tasted his neck and kissed the wet skin, following the thick muscle to the space between his collarbones. She moved the collar of his shirt, licking the fine sheen of sweat out of the hollow as it rose and fell with his erratic breath. She rested her nose against the turn in his jaw and breathed into the skin as she pulled his shirt out of his pants. He moved his face into her mouth. She put a hand on his belly and his whole body twitched. He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a long shuddering breath. She slid down and pushed the shirt up to his ribs and he arched his throat, pushing his shoulders into the wall. Her fingers wrestled with the buckle of his belt.

“Oh, God,” he moaned. “Oh Christ.”

She loosened it, unfastened the top button, and ran her tongue up the length of his arching belly. His chest lifted.

“Untie me, untie me,” he breathed. “Please.”

She put her brow against his.

“Please I want to touch you.” He tried to kiss her. “Please I want to so bad. Please.”

She held his face. “I can’t.”

“Yes you can yes you can.” He swallowed and tried to catch a breath. “You can I won’t do anything bad.” He shook his head. “I won’t…I won’t hurt you…I just…please.” He tilted his face back and his eyebrows knotted. “Please.”

Lugmokí pulled up the skirt of her dress, climbed onto him, and snaked her arms around his waist. He struggled to modulate his breathing. She found the knots with her fingertips and put her face in his hair, following the ties down to where they were tight. He went still. She loosened the knots.

“Come,” she whispered.

He looked dazed. “What?”

“Come out of here. Come out of here with me.”

He pulled his arms out from behind his back. “Where?”

“I don’t know.” She kissed him. “Anywhere.”

“You mean like…run away?”

She brushed his cheekbone with her thumb. “If there was a door in the desert would you step through it?”

“I already have.” He put his hands on her face and felt tears. “Are you saying that there’s a door out there right now?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you know where it goes?”

“No.”

“You want me to go through it with you.”

“Yes.”

A long moment drawn in breath and in silence.

“All right.” He looked in her eyes. “Let’s do it.”

***

Nymashúzet touched the river. The water hissed at her and she hissed back. Steam rose from its surface in lazy curls.

 _You touch the water, too, but yours is the water of a hot place. It rises up to join the shimmer. Those sands you run across…do they burn as hot as you do?_

She laughed at the way Nemrúshkeraz shrank back from her.

 _I have many miles to go, but I will catch up._

She leaned forward and cupped water in her hands, making it boil before drinking it. She looked across the river and into the dreaming woods. Though the scars were deep and buried in centuries of growth, she saw the places where fire had come down in the lightning and scoured the earth. She felt the memory of burned grasses and smelled the screeching descent from the Void imprinted on the skins of river stones. She drank more water. _There is always fire_ , Melkor had said. _It is everywhere, even in barren places of stone and water. It only needs to wake up._


	12. The Silmaril

 

“You know where this thing is?”

“Yes.”

“You know how far?”

“Yes.”

“Shit, girl. You’re fast.”

“I am. I am!”

“I can barely keep up!”

Lugmokí slowed in the middle of a cracked and barren lake bed and started laughing. The delighted high-pitched sound of her mirth grew wings and took off over the distant hills and their jagged spines. It filled the blue spaces between the stars. Gasping, Jeremy stumbled to a halt and looked at the expression on her face. He grinned and started to laugh with her.

“No, no,” she giggled. “You need to breathe.” She waved her hands and reached out to touch his mouth. “Stop it.”

“You’re crazy,” he panted. “You’re beautiful. And I want to kiss you right now.”

Lugmokí threw down her bag. He let his slide off his shoulder and went to each other, colliding in a tight embrace. Hands grasped the backs of necks and open mouths sealed together with wet, gasping, tongue-filled desperation. They staggered. Her hips arched. He pushed down on them.

“You need to stop doing that or I swear to God I will fuck you right here.”

She pulled him into another kiss. He hauled her belly tight to his hips and went for her neck, sucking on the skin. He bit down.

“Ah!”

“Mmmm, you like that.” He grinned against her shoulder. He slid a hand up the opposite side of her face and did it again, slow and harder. “Mmmmmm.”

“No more,” she moaned. She grabbed a handful of his hair. “No more,” she breathed. “It’s not far…it’s not far!”

He pulled on her thigh and she wrapped it around him. They panted in unison. He brushed his lips against hers and they fell into a deep humid kiss. He wrestled with her outer robe. He slid a hand into her neckline and squeezed her breast. Her breath caught.

“On the other side,” she whispered.

“You are a diabolical beast woman.” He grinned. “I like it.”

“Let’s go.”

“Oh! See, there you go, putting your lips on me.” He laughed. “Diabolical beast woman. You’re going to drive me crazy, you know that?”

She giggled and kissed his cheek and pushed him away. She picked up her bag. “Come on.”

He picked up his. The crystal fell out. Lugmokí noticed it.

“What’s that?”

He picked it up. “It fell out of the sky, if you believe it.” He tossed it up like a coin. “I think it’s dead.”

“How do you mean?”

He shrugged. “It used to glow. It doesn’t any more.” He looked at her. “Not since coming through.”

She walked up to him. He held the crystal in his palm. She touched it and the spark inside came to life.

“Hey. Look at that.” His eyes twinkled. “It likes you. You wanna hold it?”

Lugmokí picked it up. The spark inside flashed, stuttered like heat lightning on a summer horizon, and then it swelled, turning the desert night bright as day. She held it up and it brightened, erasing the shadows, racing to fill everything with the brilliance of a star, a celestial body held in the hand, and for a split second the darkness melted out of the sky and all was blue and delicate as a mild spring morning. It flashed again and all was white.

Then it went out.

Jeremy could still see her, even though his eyes should’ve been filled with a swimming green afterimage. She looked at him with trembling awe and a little fear.

“Where did you get this?”

“I told you.” He took a step forward and she took a step backward. “What? What is it?”

Lugmokí closed her hand over it. “It’s a Silmaril.”

***

The desert night swallowed the camp in a throat of starlit darkness. Every slight sound came clear as the wind dropped; the shift of the horses, the scuttle of some legged thing, the movements and breath and brush of cloth from the man’s wagon. Vanimórë could imagine what was happening although Lugmokí's mind was closed to him: mouth against mouth, hands impatient in hair and robes. There came whispers and then the creak of wood, feet on the hardpan. The man’s, heavier than Lugmokí’s barely discernible imprint. They started to run and he imagined she was taking him outside the camp where there would be less of a sense of scrutiny.

He mentally wrestled with another nascent erection. There was nothing he could do about his hungers unless he dealt with them personally. Lugmokí was not at his beck and call, and he could not find fault with her in being curious about the man. He had done the same himself, when he was out of Mordor. Lust needed to be sated or controlled, and at least he was well acquainted with not having what he wanted. She had been correct, of course. It was his responsibility to control his hunger, not hers or any-one else’s to assuage it.

He closed his eyes and took himself back into a wormhole of stone where he had waited in darkness and begun to learn what it was to endure. It was as far away from this place and this world as he could imagine, as far from desire as there was. Even that Vanimórë was another person. He dropped through the Ages of his life, almost smelled the stone, the tainted waters of Angband and felt the silence of his own fear. He thought that if he opened his eyes he would find himself there. He had not told Lugmokí of this, but she might have seen his wondering if the doors went not only from world to world by from time to time.

Who could know but whomever had made them? He hoped to Eru it was not Melkor.

His hardness ebbed away, gooseflesh pricked out over his flesh. His heart bounded. And then strong arms came around him, and he was enfolded in protective love. It overwhelmed him with its strength and profundity, scattered his fears before its force, took him from his memories, from Angband, from the desert.

Which suddenly exploded into brilliant light.

He felt it like silent thunder crashing onto and through his flesh, illuminating every particle of his being and as it ebbed, as he heard the maulobí rouse from their sleep, the balrog cried _Fëanor_!

 _That is a Silmaril_! He countered, dressing quickly, shrugging on his sword harness and leaving the tent. The maulobí were looking in every direction. He could not see Lugmokí or the man.

 _What is the difference?_ Nemrúshkeraz was moving, Vanimórë felt the shift in his energy.

 _All right. Never mind. We both know the Silmarilli. What in the Hells...?_

“The balrog is coming down,” he told Onau. “I will go and meet him.”

The stars, abashed by the blaze that had whitened the night, now began to shine out again, but Vanimórë felt the jewel's power all through him, as if it had soaked him. He began to run.

 _A Silmaril is burning._

He stopped, shook his head. On the edges of his mind he could hear voices, as if he were listening to people speaking to one another in another room.

 _What in the Hells is happening?_

He lifted his eyes to the sky and he saw Nemrúshkeraz coming in flame. It was a small, swift-moving light at first, and as he ran toward it, it slowly grew. They were both sprinting as if to a collision, but before they reached one another, the balrog slowed.

The cliffs were closer now, biting into the expanse of stars. Vanimórë came to a walk, hands ready to draw his swords. He saw a figure who shone red-gold, then dimmed to an ember. His flesh held something of that light, making him easy to see in the dark, like some lamp fashioned in the shape of a man.  
It waited for him, and as he approached, Vanimórë saw he was naked, his hair running down his flesh like intaglios of fire.

“Nemrúshkeraz?”

“Vanimórë.”

There was no hesitation in the balrog’s voice, but there was something else: curiosity, even fear. Nothing about him, save that hair, was as Vanimórë remembered from Angband. He was exceedingly beautiful. This was a Maia in its first form.

Vanimórë’s punch felled him to the stone. He stared up, making no effort to rise or retaliate, and that turned rage into bewilderment.

“Get up.”

The balrog slowly rose.

“Now tell me.”

“This is not where we are meant to be. Thou art the Vanimórë I knew...that I have seen as a Power. I know this. I feel thee as I feel Nymashúzet.”

“ _When_ didst thou come from? Dost thou know?”

The balrog nodded. “Glorfindel told me there was a great war. That Sauron was destroyed because of an artifact. A ring. It was cast into a mountain of fire. I slept a long time. It was the end of the Third Age.”

“The One Ring _should_ have been cast into Orodruin,” Vanimórë murmured. “An Age before that. Go on. How and why did the Noldor return?”

“Eru wanted them released from the Void and from bondage to the Valar.”

“And how did I and Glorfindel become a Power?”

“Thou…” Nemrúshkeraz stopped.

“Do not tease me,” Vanimórë warned.

“I am not, but thou wilt not believe me.”

“I am standing on the ground of a different world. There is very little I will not believe.”

“There is a thing, a place of power in Aman. I do not know it. I was never there. It is called Fos Almir. I think it is nothing to do with the Valar, but is set there by Eru. He can make a Power of any-one, it is said.”

“So I went to Valinor? That is one of the few things I do find hard to believe.”

“Nevertheless thou didst, and with one of the Silmarilli.”

“Should I just go mad now, or has that already happened?”

“Thou must believe me!” Nemrúshkeraz came closer. “One of the jewels was cast into the ocean, and thou didst reclaim it.”

“And that is even more unlikely.”

“Yet it happened. Eru chose thee and Glorfindel to become Valar. Thou art not Valar yet, not on this world. It must be the future. And we must return there, or how wilt thou do what thou art destined to in that world?”

Vanimórë looked at him. There was nothing in those oddly metallic eyes of lies or deception. It reminded him of...

“I was with Elgalad?” he asked.

“Yes. So Glorfindel told me.”

Such a warm, impossible, aching thought.

“I thought, when I felt the Silmaril, perhaps Fëanor had come…”

“For thee?”

“No. I suppose not.”

“Is this why he let thee live?” Vanimórë suddenly touched his face. “Because thou art beautiful like this?”

“Am I?” There was no coyness in the question.

“Yes, of course.”

Nemrúshkeraz’s mouth softened a little, into a smile of relief and gratitude. “No. He said I intrigued him.”

“Well, he and I have that in common. If only thou hadst looked like this in Angband.”

“Please. We must find a way back! Nymashúzet comes. And this is not my world. I have walked the Timeless Halls, I know there are other realities of one world, no-one knows how many save Eru, but this is not our world. We must find these doors thou hast spoken of.”

“We do not know if another door would take us back to our world.” Vanimórë said.

“Then we find others. We cannot stay here. I do not wish to and certainly thou canst not, or the future will be altered.”

Vanimórë swore. He looked across the desert. “I was going to Mordor, Lugmokí says the Sauron here knows more of the Doors than any-one.”

“I will not stay here !”

“What will Nymashúzet do to thee?”

“I do not know. But I am free now and they promised me, Glorfindel and Fëanor, even thou, that I could discover my true self.”

“I think thou hast.” Vanimórë traced his fingers across the straight bar of shoulders and felt the quiver in the over-warm flesh. “Where did the light come from, the Silmaril? As a Maia, knowest thou that?”

“No. I do not.”

“Lugmokí ran into the desert with the man. A man from another world. Let us try to find them. I have offered her my service, but thou hast told me things I cannot ignore. I would return, if I could.” To slavery and shame and pain, if he knew the future held more.

“Wilt thou forgive me?”

“Why? Art thou sorry?” Vanimórë stopped walking.

“I am sorry it was that way, but no !” The balrog sounded agonized and guilty. “I wanted thee!”

“I do not forgive, but I am willing to let it lie for the moment, Nemrúshkeraz.”

“Coldagnir.”

“Very well, Coldagnir. So thou didst come thinking it was Fëanor?”

“Thou didst not feel it? But no, thou didst not see him. I did.”

Vanimórë smiled wryly. “Is that it? Simple desire?”

“Nothing is simple with Fëanor. I wanted him to cleanse me of what I had done. And yes...I wanted him.”

“And could he? Cleanse thee?”

“He is more than thou canst know. But thou wilt know, in our world.”

“I want to know.” He walked on, to be halted by Coldagnir's fingers on his wrist. They were strong as a bench-vise.

“Thou art more, Vanimórë. I have seen it. I have felt thee. I feel thee now. The mark of Eru Ilúvatar is on thee, within thee; deeper than Melkor’s, deeper than Sauron’s.”

They shared a fulminating silence. Vanimórë loosed a pent breath. “I would like to believe thee.”

***

“It doesn’t matter.” Lugmokí looked at her glowing fist. “Let’s go.”

“Ho, wait,” said Jeremy. “Hold up.” He jerked his chin in the direction of her hand. “You know what that thing is.”

“Yes. It’s a Silmaril. I told you.”

Jeremy tilted his head and glanced at the door. “What the hell is a Silmaril?”

“It’s…it’s a long story to tell, and we don’t have the time.” She handed the crystal to him. “It chose you for its keeper and so I would have you carry it to wherever we’re going.”

“What…what’s this?” She folded her arms and turned away. He softened his voice and walked around her, bending his knees to peer up into her face. With a light touch he brought her chin around. “Wait a minute. Wait. You gonna hold this thing against me, now?” His voice lowered. “What’s with all the stilted language, huh?” He caressed her cheek. “I don’t know what this thing is, and I don’t care either.” He cocked his arm back. “If it’s gonna make you scared of me, or pull away from me, I’ll just throw it away right now.”

“No…no!” Lugmokí reached up and took hold of his fist. “Don’t. I don’t want you to do that.”

He lowered his arm. “Are we going to be all right, then?”

She looked into his eyes. “It’s dangerous in the wrong hands.”

“Okay then.” He put it in his pocket. “See?” It whiffed out. “Look. It’s gone back to sleep. I’ll hold onto it. Okay?”

“The door will close soon if we don’t go to it.”

His smile pulled sideways. “You really want out of here, don’t you?”

“Yes.” She ran a hand over the back of her neck. Her eyes flicked from the door to his face, back and forth. “It’s what I want.”

“All right.” He took her hand. “Let’s go.” He pulled. “Am I feeling hesitation, here?”

“No.” Lugmokí shook her head. “No. We…we should run.”

“Come here.” He opened his arms. “Just for a little.”

“We need to go.” She moved into his embrace and put her face into his neck. “We need to go.”

“Shhhh.” He held the back of her head. “I know.”

“We’re close enough to feel it,” she whispered. “Can you feel it?”

It moved in his flesh like the tide. He imagined the ocean of his childhood getting foamy and pulling back, all those grains of sand tumbling. “Yes. I feel it.”

She rested a hand on his nape. “It’s hard to resist when you get too close.”

He pulled back to look at her. “Do you think if we wait it will come to us?”

“Could be.” She left a kiss on the corner of his mouth. “It may be drawn closer by the power of the Silmaril.”

“Do you think so?”

She smoothed back his hair. “Things of great power have affinity for one another. There is deep attraction. It is the way lightning favors water and metal.”

Jeremy smiled. “You don’t say.”

Her eyes crinkled. “I do say.”

Jeremy sighed. “It feels almost sexual, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were closed. “Is it closer?”

“I think so,” he murmured into her hairline.

Her breath altered. She pulled out of the drowsy scent of his skin and turned her head. It was there, its arch of stone close enough to reach out and touch.

“Jeremy,” she whispered.

His eyelids lifted. He looked into the empty space. “I couldn’t resist it now if I wanted to.”

“No.”

He took her hand and stepped beneath the arch. The momentum of his crossing pulled her into his wake.

***

“Thou dost not think me a coward, then?”

“For what?”

“Fleeing from Nymashúzet?”

Vanimórë glanced aside. “I do not think fleeing from anything or any-one is a solution, but I remember her. I can see why thou wouldst fear her.”

“Because thou hast...”

“What?”

“Offered thy service to this lady. And in Angband, thy service was forced on thee. I felt the hate in thee. She is powerful, this Lugmokí. I felt her in the city. I feel Sauron in her, as I do in thee, but,” Coldagnir made a gesture with his hands. “Not the same.”

“Well, it is not the same Sauron, is it? Oh, I see. Yes, my service to Melkor and Sauron was hateful to me. It was forced on me. This was not. I will serve some-one who merits respect, man or woman. It is better if I do.”

“Thou art as confused as I by freedom,” the balrog said softly.

“Yes. And I am angry at myself for being so confused. This is what I always wanted !”

“And I.”

“I think...” Vanimórë stopped and flung out one arm. “Dost thou feel it?”

“I...” Coldagnir stiffened. “Yes.”

“This is what I felt when I was led to the Door.”

“When I came from the Timeless Halls to Arda...it was a little like this. Come !”

The encampment was to their right, they ignored it and ran and the sensation grew stronger until the hardpan under their feet seemed of itself to move, bearing them along unstoppably right to the mouth of the blank, beguiling archway. Vanimórë saw the man step into it, the whisk of Lugmokí's hair and robes vanish. He caught Coldagnir's arm and they leaped into the dark.

  


  


  



	13. Chapter 13

 

Jeremy moved through the stone arch and into an endless turning second of disorientation. It filled him to bursting with memory:

 _The sweat gathered. He felt it rolling on his skin, picking up hitchhikers until it was too fat to stay on his nose. Drip. He squinted into an orange spill of sunset light. He breathed into his trigger finger._

I came here with you to leave here with others.

 _Words exploded in his mind_ : Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! This is a bad time to be thinking about that shit so cut it! _His shoulders twitched and the words left him in a murmuring sigh: “Shut fuck. Bad time. Cut it.” His finger tightened. The rifle bucked into his shoulder. The crack of a departing projectile rolled over the gravel and dust kicked up from the wrong place. “Dammit.”_

 _He corrected the barrel and let out a slow breath. He squinted and peered through the scope, into a rising curtain of heat that warped the outline of the turbaned man up on a ridge who was doing the same to him: sighting through a veil of quicksilver, looking for the spark of sunlight in his lens and praying for stray movement. Yeah, well. He tightened his finger. Fuck you and fuck your desert god too. Pray for this. The gun bucked. The shot rolled out into the deepening shadows. The man on the ridge flung up his arms. A cloud of red mist rode the wind. The man fell on his face. The unraveled tail of his turban flapped._

 _He looked through the scope. He waited as the muscles in his legs fell asleep and the bones in his wrists started to ache. The sunlight turned orange. Dust blew onto the side of his face. The orange light deepened into red. Sweat became mud. A fly crawled across the corner of his mouth. The mud cracked. The fly flew in a ragged loop and landed on the bridge of his nose. It crawled into the furrow between his eyebrows. He looked through the scope._

 _No one moved._

 _He rolled over and slid down on his back into the dry riverbed. He squatted. Shadows and hot bonfire light slanted over the sprawled limbs of four dusty bodies. Flies buzzed around the blood. He dug a juice bag out of someone’s pack. The orange flavor bit into his tongue. The sugar floated in his head and made his salivary glands tingle._

 _He looked at the nearest corpse: young, black, facedown, ruby crater in the back of his skull_. Jenkins radioed in our position an hour ago. _On Jenkins’s right lay Burns: mid-thirties, face up, bullet through the carotid._ Burns threw the wrench at some guy’s head, some dude, what’s his name, in a pisser and threw the damn thing, and now it’s gone and the tire‘s fuckin flat and there‘s no way to fix it. Thanks, man. _Beyond him lay O’Hara, and beyond O’Hara lay Smith. O’Hara looked asleep because his cheek rested on his hands, hands that were folded like he might’ve been praying; his blown-out guts faced the opposite bank. Smith, his eyes open and looking in opposite directions, his irises caked with dust, looked dead._

 _He finished up the juice and crumpled the bag and tossed it aside. Inside him everything felt cold and stiff. He fished a battered pack of cigarettes out of his pocket._ I hate this fuckin coldness. _He tucked a butt into the corner of his mouth. He squinted into the horizon. He cupped his hand around the lighter._ Cost of business, bitches. Collateral fuckin damage. _He flicked the lighter closed. He inhaled and leaned his head into the dirt and closed his eyes and exhaled._ Winston. _He sucked smoke down into the bottoms of his lungs._ Burns threw the wrench at Winston. Bounced it right off that motherfucker’s head. Too bad he didn’t recover the damn thing. _He opened his eyes and looked into a gold sky. He had to pee._

I came here with you to leave here with others.

 _“Jesus Christ no.” He flicked the cigarette butt away from the bodies. “I’m not thinking about that shit.”_

 _He got up on his knees, shuffled away from the bodies, and unzipped his khakis._

I can’t remember the guy’s name, it was Jakes or Johns or something like that, something short and forgettable. The dude himself was a nerd, with his scrawny chest and Coke-bottle glasses and basement skin all full of zits…so one night in basic (or so he said) he hears this voice in the barracks, kind of muttering, you know, indistinct, but distinct enough for Jakes-or-Johns to hear the foreign in it, and distinct enough for the kid, who was nineteen and virgin, to understand that it was a female voice all garbled up with some accent he never heard before…female enough to pack a little lead into the kid’s half-sleeping pipe, if you know what I mean. Female enough to make him curious. So he gets out of bed and creeps around, looking for the chick that some idiot was dumb enough to try and smuggle in, but all he finds are a bunch of farting snoring dudes. He’s about ready to give it up when he hears the voice again, indistinct, and it’s talking in some language he’s never heard. __

 _He hauled out his cock._

 __This voice, it comes from nowhere and everywhere. So he gets his balls up and says something, says who are you, and the voice answers him in English, spits out this weird name he’s never heard of. She says I came here with you to leave here with others. So Jakes-or-Johns graduates his basic training and goes home, right? But he can’t get that name out of his head. So he writes it down the best he can and does a search, and as he’s telling me this part his face gets all white. Jesus Christ, he says, the name was Ishtar, look it up sometime, she’s the fucking Sumerian goddamned goddess of war, and you know where Sumer was, right? Right? Five thousand fuckin years ago or whatever? No? All right I’ll fuckin tell you then, only get ready to piss in your pants. For real. __

 _He pissed on the gravel. He closed his eyes, listening to the sound of water hitting the desert._

 __It’s Iraq. Where we’re going, man. Even telling it scares the shit out of me.

 _The stream lessened. He grunted._

This is what I think of you, ancient Sumer. Here. Have a drink. __

 _He shook off the last drops and tucked his cock into his fly. He zipped. He sat on his heels and watched the fading light gleam on urine-darkened stones, watched the stones turn light beneath the air’s thirsty kiss. A faint clink brought his attention all the way up. He stiffened at a scatter of pebbles, a subtle crunch of sand. His chest locked, hand drifting, crossing his belly until his fingers slithered around the grip of his sidearm._

 _Clink. Drone of endless wind. Clink. Gravel rolling. Clink._

 _He turned. A half-naked woman hunched over Smith’s body. An explosion of adrenaline lightened his vision and shoved him to his feet. He skidded on treacherous pebbles and loosened a drift of white dust. His gun hovered and centered on it, on her. He panted. The woman looked into Smith’s face. His finger tightened. The flat crack of the bullet rolled away beneath the wind. She squatted over Smith’s hips, her bare toes clutching the dirt. Dogtags dangled from her blood-streaked neck. Ashen light glinted off swinging metal. Flies alighted in her tangled hair and crawled on her cheeks. He took a step forward. He clenched his teeth and fired again. Her long hands, dressed in fresh blood, crawled like gruesome spiders across the dead man’s throat. He let out a strangled cry and fired. The bullet slammed into her temple. She swayed on the balls of her feet. She put Smith’s dogtags in her mouth. He emptied the clip and holes opened up in her dark skin. He flung the empty clip into the wastes. He rammed in a fresh clip and shifted his weight from foot to foot. He pointed the gun at her head. She let the dogtags fall onto Smith’s chest. His voice climbed a register, wavered, and broke._

 _“What the fuck_ is _this, man?”_

 _The buzzing flies combined with a rising wind to make a voice:_ I came here with others to leave here with you.

 _“Hell no. Oh hell no. No. No. No.” His arm shook. “I’m not gonna go crazy, man. I’m not.”_

 _He blinked. She disappeared. He blinked again. She looked at him with eyes full of flies. He let out a cracked scream. He blinked a third time. She stood astride Smith in her skirt of bloody hair. With gritty fingers he wiped the sweat off his eyelids._

 _“Am I dead?” He screamed the words. “Is this fucking hell?”_

No. _The keening wind mingled with the buzz of a million dirty wings._ You’re through the door.

“What does that mean?” His eyes stung. “I don’t know what that means!”

Not yet.

 _“I don’t…” He looked around and shrieked: “I don’t fucking understand!”_

 __Look up. __

 _He did. Like a fierce pinpoint through the orange sky gleamed a single star._

It’s too soon.

 _Adrenaline quivered in his voice. “Am I wounded? Am I going to die here? What about my team? If we’re all dead here then where are they…and who the fuck are you?”_

 __Mother. _Her voice lifted up through the flies and the hollow desert wind, tasting of mild spring moss, wrought of rustling flower petals and moonlight._ Everything. __

 _“What the---”_

Shhhhh.

***

 _Shhhhh._

Jeremy took in a breath and before he’d let it all out he’d tossed the bag onto the ground, grabbed Lugmokí’s arm, and pulled her down. He landed on his belly, the caustic stink of minerals filling his nose. Lugmokí tangled her feet and landed half on top of him. He coughed. It was dark, the cold air sharp. He closed his eyes. Heat radiated from the ground. He went still. Lugmokí flattened herself beside him and opened her mouth. He covered it with his hand. She breathed into his palm. Her jaw relaxed. He took his hand away and leaned over her ear.

“Stay down,” he whispered.

She nodded, resting her cheek on the ground.

Jeremy waited for his eyes to adjust to the moonlight. He rose into a crouch and paused. He stood. The shape of the land melted out of the darkness and every contour lined up with the bitter map in his heart.

He listened.

He sat down.

Lugmokí looked up at him. “Is it safe?”

“Reasonably. Stay below the ledge.” He chuckled. “Got me a gun, but your boy still has my bullets.”

Lugmokí got on all fours and crawled over beside him. She pulled her bag over the dusty ground. The dust got into her mouth and she spat it out. “Bitter,” she said. She sat down. “What is this place?”

He sat with his knees up and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He snorted as if he was thinking about laughing. “Welcome to ancient Sumer.”

Lugmokí moved closer to him. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know that place.”

“If it was a man and I had a knife, I would cut out its throat.” His voice remained calm. “Then I would cut out its heart and take a shit in the wound.”

Lugmokí watched him.

“I swore I’d never come back here.” Jeremy leaned his head back and sighed. He stretched out his legs. “That I’d eat a gun first. But here I am again.” He pulled his duffel into his lap, opened it, and stuck his hand inside. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes. “It’s Iraq. One giant fucking sandy grave.”

“This is your place of war.”

He put a cigarette in his mouth. He nodded. “Yeah.”

She looked across the wash. “What do we do?”

He cupped a hand around the lighter. He lit the cigarette. He looked at her with lucid eyes and blew out a long thin line of smoke. “We don’t die.”

***

From dark desert to dark desert.

Vanimórë let his shoulder take the impact of the fall and came to his feet. He heard a faint sound behind him: Coldagnir.

 _Not the same desert._

 _Not the same world._

There was a moon though. He knew the dark marks on its face. He had spent thousands of nights watching it wax and wane. It did not look changed, but then it had not in Lugmokí's world either.

She was lying flat, she and Jeremy, and he went down, Coldagnir copying him on instinct. An acrid taste filled his mouth and he spread his hands. The earth groaned with memories. He felt the tread of armies through the ages, on foot, driving chariots, on horseback. Blood melted into the sand and painted the rocks. Ages of war, the kind he knew, and then something greater, more devastating: fire gulped air down its throat and explosions like the wrath of Orodruin shocked the ground. More death. The land never tired of it.

He had a last impression that held him still for a moment: Dana’s smile, all-knowing, unknowable.

 _This is not my world._

He raised his head. Coldagnir was staring at him.

I do not know, he answered the question in the wide eyes and looked at Jeremy. _But I think he does._

***

Jeremy looked at Vanimórë. “Why is he naked?”

“He burned his clothes,” Vanimórë murmured in English, feeling Coldagnir look at him and at Jeremy as if trying to understand the language. “Balrogs are beings of fire. He was running from another balrog.” He looked up at the moon-doused stars. “We will have to find him something to wear. Where are we?”

Lugmokí’s eyes moved from Vanimórë to Coldagnir and back again. “Why did you follow?”

He tilted his head. “Why did you go? Coldagnir is running from Nymashúzet and I...I need to find my way back, if it is possible.”

“This is my world, gentlemen,” said Jeremy. “I’d say welcome, but…” He shrugged and took the cigarette into his fingers. “There’s no welcome in this part of it.”

“This is a country at war,” said Lugmokí. “A war of guns and bombs. It’s very dangerous.”

“Yeah, speaking of which,” said Jeremy. “You have my bullets by any chance?”

“I feel the war. Ages of it.” Vanimórë hesitated a moment. He withdrew the bullets and handed the wrapped package to Jeremy. “So...this is your world, Jeremy, but there is no welcome here for you? Or us? We are on enemy soil, in your world, where every-one uses these guns. And you have the only one.” He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to think if he had ever been in a worse situation. Well, of course in Angband, and in Mordor, but Melkor or Sauron had never actually wanted him dead. “Do you have a plan?”

“About five hundred yards southeast of here there’s a building. I don’t know if it’s occupied or not, but it’s not much more than a ruin. Still, it’s a roof and two floors, and there’s probably water, though I don’t know if we’ll be able to get it out of the ground.” Jeremy took a long drag off the cigarette. “There’s also a road. If my memory serves me right there’s a village...five, maybe ten kilometers from here.” He gestured, the coal drawing lines in the dark. “Last I was here, there were some goatherds in the area. I can’t hear any bells, so I don’t think there are any around right now, but these guys have guns and they’d probably shoot me on sight because I’m wearing these stupid goddamned army duds, which I need to get rid of as soon as I possibly can.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway…you follow?”

Lugmokí nodded. “Yes.”

Vanimórë’s eyes narrowed. “The people of this land do not know us, and we are not dressed as you. What are they like in appearance? Will they shoot any stranger or could some-one find a way of approaching them close enough to…er…borrow their clothes?”

“You don’t blend, if that’s what you mean.” Jeremy smoked the cigarette down to the filter and pitched it out into the dark. “She does, especially all veiled up, but women aren’t worth much in this country and a woman alone would rouse too much suspicion.”

Vanimórë glanced at Lugmokí. “Goat herders go with their flocks and arouse no suspicion; they are part of the land. If they are the same as the Haradhrim. We have to disguise ourselves and pass, unremarked, for now at least. Some-one needs to get close to them. If we get close enough we will not need guns to deal with them.”

“If your guys in the Hara-whatever go around in robes and ride camels and push their herds around, then yeah, the people here are pretty much the same. Except, of course, for their assault rifles.” Jeremy’s mouth quirked into a dry little grin. “I highly doubt your Hara-guys have those.”

“What he means is that the Haradhrim are a nomadic and tribal people,” said Lugmokí. “They are everywhere with their livestock.”

“Yeah.” Jeremy nodded. “That’s as good a description of the Bedouin tribes as I have heard.”

Vanimórë stared into the night. “Lugmokí and I do not know this world, but we know the ways of the Haradhrim, how to live as they do, and we can learn their tongue. We will have to find a camp at night. And do whatever we have to do.”

“Yeah,” said Jeremy, speaking as if to a simpleton. “Hence the building.” He cocked a thumb over his shoulder. “We’d have to recon it first, but if you’ll let me borrow one of those pig-stickers, Lugmokí can cover me.”

Vanimórë pressed down on his anger. “You want one of my swords?” He reached over and drew one forth, presenting it over his forearm. “Very well.”

Lugmokí remained silent and watched Coldagnir, looking him over by the weak moonlight. He had pulled himself into a kneeling position and was twisting his long hair into a loose knot. He had the tongue. It was one of the things Maia learned easily, as if all languages were buried somewhere within them. He dropped his hands and then bowed from the waist to Lugmokí, for he could sense her power, but didn’t know what to say to her. He took a breath. His words came slow and broken.

“This…she would like this place.”

Vanimórë turned his head. “Who?”

“Nymashúzet.” Coldagnir looked at Lugmokí. “You felt her, lady. In the city. It was why she felt so close.” He bowed his head, shook it. “She will come, you know. She knows of these doorways, these worlds. She is free, and until she finds what she wants, she will...travel. She has been asleep for too long.”

Jeremy took the sword. “That sounds like cheerful news.”

“She is a whore of destruction.” Lugmokí put a hand on the feverish ground. “Her spirit lives in the bombs and the chaos of this place.”

“Well, I am sure she will not take us unawares,” Vanimórë said dryly. “It is not in her nature to be quiet. And she is not here yet.”

Coldagnir’s smile was sad and wise in the darkness. “It is only a matter of time, and time is strange once one enters the realm where the doorways are. Is there anything I can do?”

“Don’t burn,” said Lugmokí. “Don’t do it unless you have no other choice. These guns will kill you. You have no experience of their capabilities, but trust me. Even fire cannot outrun these projectiles.”

Jeremy looked at Coldagnir. “So…this guy is like a human torch?”

Lugmokí nodded. “Yes.”

“Huh.” His eyebrows went up. “That’ll come in handy, won’t it?”

Coldagnir flushed. “I will not burn. It was the only way I could get out of the city.” He looked up at Lugmokí and touched his chest. “I know weapons can wound me in this form, Lady. They have done before.”

“It was as well you did leave the city,” Vanimórë murmured. “Nymashúzet would have brought terror to Sudu Cull. But I do agree; to use that power here will be like lighting a beacon. We have to try and be covert.”

Coldagnir nodded. “I do not want to cause deaths. More deaths.”

Vanimórë shook his head. “Your sensibilities have certainly changed, but I am afraid we may have to.” He glanced at Jeremy.

“Okay, so you’re saying that Human Torch here, in a past incarnation, might’ve barbecued Baghdad?”

“The balrogs caused massive destruction when Melkor used them in war.” Vanimórë remembered the dust of Anfauglith. “There were few if any who could meet and match them in battle. This one appears to have had a change of heart, but do not be deceived. And he was not even the mightiest.”

Coldagnir flinched. He said, as if wrung from him: “We lived…to burn.”

“Wow, that’s…” Jeremy puffed out air. He gave a crooked little grin. “Badass. Well, so long as you don’t cook me, I think we’ll get along all right.”

Lugmokí looked up at the stars. She shivered. “By moonrise I would say it’s not far past midnight. Of course, moonrise here may be different.”

Jeremy looked up. “Nah, it’s about the same.” He looked at her. “Are you cold?”

“A little,” she said. “The air…it does not get this cold at night in the Harad.”

“That’s because it’s winter.” He rummaged around in the duffel. “So the daytime temperature is somewhere between getting a nice suntan and needing a lazy afternoon nap. It’s a nice change from summer, where it’s a cross between sticking your head in an oven and walking on the sun. This is good for us, really. It’ll make our water needs that much easier to manage.” He nodded in Coldagnir’s direction. “I suppose Torchy McFlame here doesn’t need as much water as the rest of us, and if that’s true, then it’s great news. Finding water is going to be hard enough.” He pulled out a pair of field glasses and handed them to Lugmokí. “You know how to use these, right?”

She took them. “I do.”

“What are they?”

“Field glasses,” said Jeremy. “Look through em and you can see a long way. Clearly, too.” He nodded in Vanimórë’s direction. “Try em.”

Lugmokí handed them over. Vanimórë frowned as he took them up. He looked through them and handed them back. “I can see what they do, but I do not think I will need them. I am Sauron’s son by an Elf-woman. I cannot see the way Sauron sees things, through things, far away, which would be extremely useful here, but I do have Elven sight.”

Jeremy reached out and took them. “You aren’t the one with the gun, are you?”

“I can,” said Lugmokí. “I can see…through things, and far away. Not as Sauron can, of course, but my eyes are sharper than those of even Elf-kind, and I see as an Orc in the dark.” She looked at Jeremy. “I don’t need field glasses, but I appreciate the offer.”

He looked at her for a moment. He shrugged. “More for me.”

Lugmokí loaded the gun. The chambering round was loud in the stillness. “I’m ready.”

“Hold back a couple hundred feet or so, and if you hear anything, anything at all—I don’t care if it’s a sidewinder farting—I want you to drop and find the best cover you can.” He put a hand on her shoulder, moving his head so he could look in her eyes. “Okay?”

She nodded. “I will.”

Jeremy climbed out of the riverbed. He ran toward the building, Lugmokí holding back with the rifle in her hands. He paused, heart beating in his ears, breath roaring in his throat, and waited. Lugmokí circled around, taking the higher ground. When his breath had slowed, Jeremy got up off the ground and approached the building. It was small, a house, with one story and glassless windows like eyes. He breathed in through his nose.

 _I don’t smell any water._

Like a distant hum caught in his ear, he heard something that wanted to be words.

“What?” he whispered.

More of the same, high-pitched and sweet like a sigh.

A tight hard burst of adrenaline knocked against his breastbone. His breath got shallow and he looked around. He closed his eyes.

“Focus. You can do this.”

He opened his eyes and moved toward the house. It was built of smooth stone, the whitewash falling away in chunks. Moonlight fell through a hole in the roof. He clutched the sword and flattened himself against the wall, next to the door, and held his breath. He listened until his limbs got tight. He let out the air and ducked in through the door. “Empty,” he said, and remembered that he wasn’t wearing a headset.

He squatted and looked around. He saw plastic wrappers bleached by the sun and an empty can. Bullet casings littered the floor. _Give a hoot, don’t pollute._ He picked one up and looked it over. _I guess they don’t get that PSA out here._ He tossed it away and wiped his fingers on his legs.

He stood and looked out the window toward the riverbed. A bridge spanned it in the distance, carrying train tracks. A stone rolled on the threshold and he had the sword pulled back before he saw that it was Lugmokí. He let out a ragged breath.

“I told you to hold back!”

“There’s no one here.”

“It doesn’t—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It doesn’t matter! I tell you to hold back and you _hold back_ , goddammit!”

Lugmokí leaned the gun against the wall. “There’s no one here. It’s safe.”

“You don’t know that.” He pressed his hands into his forehead. “You never know that.” His fingers trembled. “You never, ever know that out here you don’t understand this isn’t like where you come from a bullet comes out of nowhere and just…just…it just rips your goddamned face off.”

“I see further than you do,” she said. “Remember?”

He looked at her.

“The land is empty.” She put a hand on the window frame and looked out. “Just us. I don’t think there’s any water here, either.” She looked at him. “I can’t smell it.”

“Get away from the window.”

“I told you—”

His tone sharpened. “Just do it.”

She stepped out of the window’s frame and moved into the darkness.

“Look, Lugmokí, you have to listen to me here.”

She walked under the hole in the roof and moonlight gleamed across her hair.

“I know you’re some big poobah where you come from, but out here…out here.” His voice lowered. “Out here it’s the bullet you don’t see that kills you. Hell, the bullet you _do_ see that kills you.”

She used the side of her foot to scrape loose shells into a pile.

“It’s not like arrows or slingshots or whatever the fuck you’re used to. Okay?”

She cleared a wide spot on the baked clay floor.

He grabbed her shoulder and shook it until she looked up. He raised his voice.“Okay?”

She held his gaze until his cheeks turned pink and he grew flustered. He shook his head. He rubbed his face.

“Is there anything here we can use?”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.” He rubbed his chin. “I didn’t see anything.”

She moved his hand and kissed him. His startled breath filled her mouth.

She pulled off her outer robe, tossed it onto the floor, and lifted her inner robe until it was over her head. He caught it, the silk light and slippery, and disentangled her arms. She pushed his t-shirt up and he took it off. He kissed her half-open mouth. She tightened her fingers on his hair and filled his mouth with her tongue. His blood pulsed and throbbed to the edge of his skin.  
“Okay,” he panted. “Okay.”

She spread her outer robe on the floor. She got on her back. He knelt between her spread knees and unbuckled his belt. He pulled it loose, tossing it to one side, and unzipped his pants, blinded by the sight of her body; she pulled him down and kissed him, steadying him with the taste of her breath and the hot velvet of her tongue. He moved his face over her skin, her tiny silken hairs bitter with dust.

She lifted her back. He pushed forward, into her, his eyes half-closed, and sighed into the luscious heat of deep penetration. She shifted her thighs, widening them, and as he sank into her belly, he put his hands on her face. He felt the tremble in her jaw as he started to move and his spine tingled at the sharp draw of her breath, humid air blasting the roots of his hair, and he slid down into her tightening flesh, pulling out of the soft grip of her loins before pushing in again, a growl curling up in his throat, laying in wait inside a nest made of ragged breath. She dug her heels into the floor, tilting her hips in tiny sharp thrusts. Hot aching pleasure pulled the bottom out of his stomach and poured into his groin until his head lightened and his muscles tightened. The skin of his tongue felt too small.

Hard, hard. Harder. Harder. The flexion of her trunk, the grind of her hips, gliding on a cushion of pungent sweat. He propped himself on his forearms and looked into her fierce face, watching it change, her rawness seeping up through the cracks.

“Fuck, you’re beautiful.” He wanted to touch all the tender trembling places with the tip of his tongue. He craved their ancient tastes, their secret rhythms. “Fuck... _fuck_.”

She pushed against the floor. She bowed her back. She looked like a broken doll, like a storm, her eyelashes spiky and her face glazed with sweat; she smelled mossy and wet, scorched with lightning and with greed. Her breath hooked into him. Her moan pulled on his guts.

“Jeremy,” she whispered.

Bones broke in his mind. Hot blood. Resistance. His fists tightened. His jaw trembled with suppressed violence. Her fingers clenched. Her breath broke and she convulsed, the wild misfiring of her nerves tight and hard. He held her down. She brought her face up and bit into the curve of his neck. The pain shocked a growl out of him. He thrust as hard as he could. Her legs wrapped around his back.

The orgasm came upon him and his body tensed. He held it in as long as he could, toes curling, the sweat pushing out of his skin, but the intensity unlocked his chest and he cried out, the long muscles in his thighs spasming; he put his face in her neck and groaned, long and broken, the sound throbbing like a heart, and he kissed the slickness of her jaw, licking the tang of salt, and he kissed the other side of her neck as the last shivering ecstasy left him. She rubbed the back of his head as her breath slowed. He fumbled up onto his forearms, still panting, and took her face in his hands.

He swallowed. “Was it good?” he whispered. “Did…did you…”

She pulled him down into a kiss. He let himself sink into it, breathing hard through his nose. She ran a finger up his spine. His breath fluttered.

“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes.”

He grinned.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was edited by Pink_Siamese.


End file.
